"We provide the bloggers with a platform that gets a lot of traffic," she continued. "Theoretically they could have their own blog, but maintaining a blog is an enormous amount of work. And if they have 'another life' and another line of work, it's very hard to maintain a blog that gets traffic."

Even so, Huffington is not completely unreceptive to the idea of compensating bloggers in some fashion. One idea she is considering would connect her most popular bloggers to some share of the revenue generated by the ads next to their posts.

"We are looking at a model which would allow contributions to be made to a blogger's favorite charities," she said. "Our bloggers would choose a number of charities, and we're working out a revenue model which would allow money to be sent to those charities."

Will that be enough to keep the talent happy if HuffPo starts running deeply in the black? The proprietor had better hope so. After all, what would happen to the Huffington Post if all 1,800 of its unpaid bloggers decided to join the picket line alongside the Hollywood screenwriters who so incensed Ari Emanuel?

Huffington smiled. "We would have to write a lot more ourselves," she said.

Arianna Huffington wants to make Huffington Post

a force among news sites on the Web.

_{Photograph by: Deborah Feingold/Corbis Outline}