ROSSLYN, Virginia — The newsroom of The Politico, the largely online news venture starting publication in two weeks, looks like a typical one — reporters tap on computers at adjacent desks while banks of televisions hum overhead. But unlike a standard daily newspaper, The Politico will be devoted to a single topic: national politics. Another big difference: It is hiring.

As many newspapers across the country are cutting their staffs and trimming back on Washington coverage, The Politico is finding younger journalists and some veterans — including John Harris and Jim VandeHei from The Washington Post, Mike Allen from Time magazine and Roger Simon from Bloomberg News — who are willing to leave the once-secure confines of traditional print to join a start-up.

"It seems riskier to stay in print than to go to something new," said Ben Smith, 30, a reporter for The Daily News in New York, who will be writing a blog for The Politico about the 2008 presidential campaign.

If The Politico succeeds, it could signal that the Web has become a more plausible alternative for mainstream journalists. (Most bloggers offer their Web logs free, and rare is the site that pays reporters for original content.)

But there are skeptics who say that the focus of The Politico is too narrow and the marketplace too crowded with sources of political news, including sites like RealClearPolitics.com and scores of other publications, including newspapers and their Web sites. Partisans, especially, feast on sites that affirm their views; The Politico says it will be nonpartisan.

The Politico, financed by Allbritton Communications and based in suburban Washington in a glassy tower that once housed Gannett, has smoothed the transition for print journalists with handsome salaries, though no one is talking exact figures.

Its publisher, Robert Allbritton, scion of the banking and media family that owned the now defunct Washington Star, said in an interview that he would finance The Politico for "the foreseeable future" and has committed to paying for expensive campaign travel. He has hired a staff of about 50 people, almost half of them journalists.

"Newspapers have to be all things to all people," Allbritton said. "On the Internet, there is no one site that delivers everything. It's broken down into mini- mini-subdivisions of interests and they attract people who are passionately interested in one subject."

Allbritton also said he had no political agenda and was in the business because it could be profitable; if Google or some other entity eventually wanted to buy it, he said, "that would be great," but that it is not part of his business plan. (Allbritton had briefly considered buying The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, but declined; the asking price was a reported $40 million.)

He is best known for following his father, Joe Allbritton, as chief executive of the Riggs Bank, which was sold in 2004 after a Senate investigation found that General Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, had kept millions of dollars in secret accounts at Riggs. Robert Allbritton has been chairman and chief executive of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and a half dozen other markets, since 2001.

He predicted that The Politico would start turning a profit in less than five years, from advertising in all of its incarnations — on the Web, with its own television program and in a limited print edition, with 30,000 copies three days a week while Congress is in session and one day a week when Congress is in recess. The Politico will be free for readers, both online and in print.

It is hoping to attract the kind of advertisers that already pay to be in other publications aimed at Washington — chiefly, political advocacy groups that are trying to influence Congress, as well as local businesses.

One of the few models for what The Politico is trying to do might be Inside.com, a media-oriented Web site that tried to branch into print and conferences. It started in 2000 with venture capital backing and it, too, attracted well-known journalists eager for the promise of riches and fame from the Web. It vanished almost two years later after the dot-com bust.