Is it possible that a young neoconservative journalist, a self-described "regular guy in Brooklyn" who likes to posts daily attacks about The New York Times on his Web site, has stumbled on a model to make content work?

It's certainly a question that those of us who follow media might be asking.

First, let me back up a moment. This week we learned that the city may be getting a new daily newspaper, The New York Sun. While it's not exactly official, several sources close to the story confirm that a group of approximately 10 investors, including Canadian newspaper magnate Conrad Black and New York philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, have raised $16 million to help launch the new venture early next year.

Or perhaps I should write $16 million to help extend the venture. That's because The New York Sun -- as the paper may be called -- is actually a spinoff of Smartertimes.com, a Web site known for its neoconservative critiques of The Times. Smartertimes is the brainchild of Ira Stoll, the former managing editor for the Jewish weekly The Forward.

According to the New York Observer, which broke the story on Wednesday, the new paper will be run by former Forward editor-in-chief Seth Lipsky, as well as Stoll.

Even though Lipsky and Stoll have remained tight-lipped about the launch, several investors have corroborated the story for just about every newspaper in town, including the NY Daily News, New York Post and even The Times. Nearly all these stories report that The Sun, which will appear five days a week, will likely cover city news from the same neoconservative viewpoint which shapes Stoll's daily attacks on The Times.

Reporters have been quick to highlight two aspects of the story. One is the political dust-up that created Smartertimes.com in the first place. For those of you unfamiliar with this part of the story it goes like this: In 1990 Lipksy resurrected The Forward -- an English-language descendant of the onetime Yiddish (and socialist) daily -- to cover national and local Jewish news. But by the spring of 2000, the weekly paper's board of directors, increasingly unhappy with Lipsky's conservative leanings, ousted him.

Stoll followed his boss soon afterwards, launching Smartertimes.com in mid-2000. He's been promising ever since that his Web site would one day lead to the creation of "a new newspaper that would offer an alternative to the dominant daily."

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Then there's the question of timing. Given recent high-profile magazine failures like Mademoiselle and Brill's Content, not to mention Web hybrids like Inside, Nerve and Silicon Alley Reporter, now doesn't seem like the most auspicious time to launch anything more expensive than a beer kegger.

Or as Josh Mills, director of the business journalism program at Baruch College told the Daily News, "it's a pretty brave man who wants to start a new publication in this economy."

But what none of these accounts has mentioned is the way in which Stoll has leveraged a one-man Web-only publication into a print daily. After all, we've been told ever since last year's dot-com meltdown that the key to success for any new content play (in fact, any enterprise) is to start small and stay focused on the niche audience.

These days, one-man Web logs like Jim Romenesko's Media News and I Want Media get the sort of daily traffic that many content behemoths ten times their size could once only dream about.

Whatever one thinks of Stoll's politics, or the dogged nature of his regular screeds on The Times, he's done a remarkable job of building a framework to launch a larger publication. Already his Website features an index that helps readers find op-eds by subject matter (from "Abortion" and "Communists" to "United Nations" and "Welfare and Poverty").

And the fact both Stoll and his former boss have managed to attract enough money to bankroll a daily should at least prove that the Internet -- even after all that Silicon Alley and New York have been through -- is still a great way to build up a content play from scratch.

Now it remains to be seen whether there's any long-term viability to this Web-to-riches model. New York Newsday, the city's last daily addition to newsstands, folded its New York City spin-off in 1995 after blowing through $100 million in 10 years.

Stoll has already shown you can build a content web site and they will come. Now the really hard part begins.

* Paul Zakrzewski, former associate editor of atNewYork.com, is a freelance writer and literary events planner.