Tim Sprinkle

Christopher N. Curtin, VP-digital strategy for Hewlett-Packard, says Huffington is considered a higher-end buy among marketers. "Their audience is a pretty attractive one," he said, "and it's the content that's drawing that audience."

It also underscores an emerging but difficult truth for professional writers. Free content can just as easily draw a higher-profile readership as expensive content, as well as high-end advertisers. Wikia, Jimmy Wales' for-profit venture, also harvests page views from freely contributing members, and the company has already proclaimed its profitability. The site functions much like Wikipedia but centers on entertainment -- for example, the "Twilight" Wiki. Mr. Wales said the site will continue to be profitable this quarter. Wikia has a monthly audience of 11 million, according to ComScore, who on average spend roughly 25 minutes on the site.

Despite a widespread jingoism among media watchers favoring new forms of journalism, some observers say no-cost writing is a disquieting trend. "I wonder whether we're seeing the 'Craigslist effect,' but for content," Newsonomics author Ken Doctor said, referring to how the free-listings site has vitiated the classifieds business. "You make the cost of content creation so much cheaper, but in so doing you are ruining the economics of traditional news publishing."

Eric Bates, Rolling Stone's editor, concedes that "there's still this lingering sense that you're a music magazine and what are you doing over in Afghanistan? I call it the 'of all places' syndrome." But he said that view is changing after the biweekly magazine's stinging stories on such topics as the BP oil spill and the Wall Street bailout.

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The 43-year-old magazine can rightfully claim a history of outsider journalism, going back to Thompson's drug- and alcohol-fueled binges. Timothy Crouse's observations of reporters on the 1972 presidential campaign became the classic book "Boys on the Bus." Tom Wolfe's articles on NASA's original seven astronauts led to the 1979 book "The Right Stuff." Evan Wright was embedded with a Marine unit during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his stories became a book and then the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill."

The coverage can be overheated and politically loaded, but it is not restrained. "They give you an enormous amount of space to address any topic I want, and there's no editorial interference in terms of political viewpoint, and I can use any language I want," says Taibbi.

Bates sees Rolling Stone going back to its roots. "In the last 10 years," he says, "the magazine has returned to form and made it a point to go after abuses of power."

Wenner offers a simple explanation: "We're not a public company, afraid of whatever the implications of that may be. We're independent. I own it."

Investigative reporting is increasingly being outsourced, and these offices off K Street serve as a boiler room for research that the big boys are less able to afford. The Center for Public Integrity is hardly a traditional news operation, but it is taking on a more prominent media role, fueled by a recent hiring spree that has added more than half a dozen journalists to its 45-person staff.

"We see all our friends dying on the vine," Kaplan says. "The irony is we're doing pretty well, and we have a chance to fill these gaping holes." And the center fills those holes free of charge, furnishing information -- and sometimes staff-written pieces -- to the media outlets.

After years of feeling unloved and unwanted, some fortunate journalists are again finding their services in demand. While most print newsrooms remain shrunken and some major newspapers are mired in bankruptcy, new media incarnations are giving the restless and the jobless a second lease on life.

AOL says it plans to add hundreds of journalists to its stable over the next year. Yahoo has opened a Washington bureau. The Wall Street Journal just created a New York section. And TBD, owned by Politico's corporate parent, is recruiting for its online effort to cover the Washington area.