LESLEY: So as so often happens, sometimes our worst defeats and lowest moments get turned into lessons that help us with the next chapter. So let me ask you about the new chapter, which is Huffington Post.

ARIANNA: Yes.

LESLEY: Obviously I have a personal interest in the questions I’m going to ask you, because of wowOwow.com, but I’m wondering how you’re viewing what everybody who’s putting content onto the Web is coping with, and that is the drying up of ad money. So what are your thoughts on what the next model is going to be?

ARIANNA: Well, we are finding that … we had our best advertising month last month.

LESLEY: Really?

ARIANNA: Yes, and we are finding that … the opposite. We are finding that advertisers are turning away from print and moving online in a much faster way than they had been moving. I think still lagging behind where eyeballs are, but much less so. And I think part of it is because the rates online are so much cheaper than in print, partly because, you know, the big advertising entities like GM and Chrysler and, of course, all the personals that were taken up by Craigslist are not there. So certainly for the Huffington Post the model is entirely advertising supported.

LESLEY: This is a good model for the future?

ARIANNA: Yes. I feel that … I feel that absolutely it’s a good model. Now we are facing the question of, "Can advertising support investigative journalism?" And I think that not at the moment, of course, so that’s why we … we are now looking at a not-for-profit/for-profit model, when it comes to investigative journalism, which, as you know, is very expensive. So we raise money from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Schuman Foundation and also we put Huffington Post money into the Investigative Fund. That means that any investigative pieces created by the Fund will be open source, will be available to everybody at the same time. So you could pick up everything and post it, in its entirety, at the same time as the Huffington Post does.

LESLEY: You know this is absolutely essential for our democracy to find a way to pay – to pay the journalists, to pay for journalism —

ARIANNA: Right.

LESLEY: — in a way that makes the smartest kids who graduate from our colleges want to go into this profession.

ARIANNA: Absolutely. But if you look at the billions of dollars that are raised every year for university endowments, why do we think we can’t have billions of dollars raised every year to fund journalists?

LESLEY: Well, we’ve never had the problem before.

ARIANNA: I know. But we do now.

LESLEY: We certainly do. I mean, just … even if it’s not investigative journalism, just daily journalism with all these newspapers is in so much trouble. I’m not talking people who delve behind; I’m talking about the people who ask our elected officials the tough questions. If our society can’t find a good model to pay them, we’re in trouble.

ARIANNA: Well, I think there are many, many models – many distribution models, and many funding models that we are going to be looking at and experimenting with. The model that I really don’t think is going to work is putting content behind walls and pretending that the last 15 years did not happen, the last 15 years in terms of technological advances, in terms of changes in consumer habits.

LESLEY: What do you mean behind? I don’t know what you mean – put content behind walls. You mean making people pay for content on the web? The readers?