As Eli Sanders at The Stranger‘s Slog notes, the P-I Web site’s ever so slightly added more links to outside news sites. Sanders then wonders out loud whether this is a harbinger of a future online-only P-I remaking itself into a local version of the Huffington Post.

Paul Andrews has expanded thoughts about this prospect. Go read his stuff yourself, then come back here.

Back so soon?

OK. HuffPo’s a great site, with healthy readership figures and ad revenues. Andrews is right to nail “news as personality” as one leg of its business-model tripod. (The other two are original blog entries and carefully chosen links to other sites’ news stories.)

It’s the “personality” that differentiates HuffPo from all the headline aggregators out there. At its heart is Arianna Huffington herself (even though she lives in LA and the site’s produced in NY). Her personality, and her range of interests, define the site’s general political POV, its curation of content, and its audience niche.

But despite its slogan (“The Internet Newspaper”), it’s not a source of much primary information. It has a couple of staff reporters, and it pays the Associated Press to post AP articles on its own pages, but most of its news items are carefully chosen (and re-headlined) links to stuff researched and written by others. HuffPo’s blog posts are mostly original (a few are simultaneously “cross-posted” at other sites), but none of them are paid for.

For all its accomplishments, HuffPo’s not the elusive answer to the conundrum of online news reporting and how to pay for same.

HuffPo’s formula, by itself, isn’t going to preserve the P-I as a professionally staffed newsroom.

But it might provide two ingredients toward the final recipe.

One is establishing mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers and solo Web journalists.

The other, more subtle, component is a site’s “voice” (or, to be coldly corporate, its brand image).

The P-I already has a stronger voice than any other mainstream print daily in the region. Thus, it has a head start in this department.

For another angle on branding, consider the Northwest beer industry.

Around the time the P-I shotgun-married the Times in the papers’ first Joint Operating Agreement, the first local microbreweries (Redhook and Grant’s) started up.

At the time, our region already boasted five major breweries, all producing nearly-identical watery lagers, differentiated mostly by advertising. The last of those breweries, Olympia, closed in 2003.

Instead, WA and OR now boast a lively array of smaller outfits creating a vast array of products. These products really are unique, not merely advertised as such.

As news moves online and becomes more decentralized, it will, by necessity, morph from the verbal equivalent of the old stubby-bottle Oly into a wider palette of flavors, crafted on a more artisanal basis.

I’m reminded of how Weimar-era Berlin had as many as 70 daily newspapers. These weren’t all huge endeavors. Some were raucous little scandal sheets. Others were intellectual and ideological journals. But each of them scraped out its own piece of the market.

That’s what news sites will need to do.