Arianna launches the HuffFund

David Simon, creator of The Wire and subject of today’s cover story on The First Post, will be delighted to hear that Arianna Huffington has thrown her influence and money behind a new scheme to train the next generation of investigative reporters.

Simon, a former crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun, has been bemoaning the state of the American newspaper industry. Without its watchdogs in the press, America, he believes, risks sliding into the kind of broken society he depicts in The Wire.

Huffington, the socialite turned online publisher, intends to change all that by throwing money at old-fashioned investigations. "For too long, whether it's coverage of the war in Iraq or the economic meltdown, we've had too many autopsies and not enough biopsies," says the 58-year-old proprietor of the Huffington Post. "The HuffFund is our attempt to change this. It will also provide new opportunities for seasoned journalists who have been laid off or forced into early retirement."

Whether the HuffFund will be a long-term success is an entirely different question. Huffington intends to pay freelance and staff writers for the reports and investigations they work on but says she will distribute the resultant articles for free.

Much as Simon might admire that intention, he would surely not recommend Huffington’s business model. "If you think that free is going to produce something that's as much of a cost centre as good journalism - because it costs money to do good journalism - you're out of your mind," he told the Guardian last week. ·