A website started five years ago, largely for people to complain about the Bush administration, has become one of the biggest successes of the Internet age in terms of the future of journalism. The site, The Huffington Post, run by Arianna Huffington, attracted 24 million unique visitors during the month of July 2010 alone.

Interestingly enough, despite that huge audience, the HuffPo site makes just over $1 per reader per year. The site invariably mixes links, videos and slide shows, together with reader comments to tell a story, and with its developers all over the world, the site is essentially kept going 24 hours a day. Approximately 40% of the articles that the site runs are obtained from other sites – so it is not necessarily creating its own content.

One of the things that interest me, because I do feel that a lot of websites allow a very ugly, free for all, in the name of “freedom of speech” is that the company employs 20 staff whose only job it is to remove nasty comments because while the site recognises that people want to participate these days, and not just consume information, the site’s policy is to keep things civil – something I believe in.