Arianna Huffington’s new blog, the Huffington Post, features well-known contributors like Al Franken, Norman Mailer and Christie Hefner commenting in free-form Web style on politics, culture and the media.

And unlike many blogs operated as a hobby by one person out of a bedroom, this one has a paid staff and hopes of making money by a first-of-its-kind agreement to distribute content to newspapers.

What it doesn’t have is ads. On that point, it’s hardly alone.

“I’m seeing (blogs) popping up, but I’m not seeing them attracting much advertising yet,” said David Card, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, a New York media consultancy. “You need either a large general audience or a large share of a specialized audience. It’s not worth the trouble otherwise.”

Huffington’s blog, which launched May 9, has drawn lots of media attention, given the Los Angeles author’s high profile as a pundit and former candidate for California governor. Huffington Post LLC, the Delaware-based company Huffington created for the site, has seven full-time employees in New York and Los Angeles, including editors and technical support people.

It’s backed with funding from Huffington, Ken Lerer, a former executive vice president of AOL Time Warner, and other business partners. Huffington and Lerer declined to speak publicly about the Huffington Post as a business, saying it’s premature to discuss profits or plans. But they have made it clear that they are running the Huffington Post as a profit-making business and not a vanity project.

Still, making any substantial money would be unusual.

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The full story

is available in the May 23 edition of the Los Angeles Business Journal.