and Harvard are the Eton and Oxbridge of America (the Bushes were Phillips and Yale).

"I'm no relation to Hugh Hefner (of Playboy)," he says. "This Heffner clan has charted a different course in journalism and public service." His grandfather, "a great source of inspiration", is a journalist who hosts The Open Mind programme on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), while his father is a leading New York prosecutor who hounds mobsters and bent Wall Street titans.

Perhaps because he is only 19 years old, Heffner is oblivious to cliché

Scoop's new mission, he says, is to "hold the Obama administration to account." And there lies the rub. What is original about that? That's what the media is supposed to do. Even the name, Scoop, has a secondhand ring to it. It was, after all, the title of Evelyn Waugh's unrivalled novel of the ways of journalism, and Tina Brown, famed former editrix of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, has just borrowed the novel's newspaper title, The Daily Beast, for a web magazine of her own.

Originality turns out to have nothing to do with it: perhaps because he is only 19, more cocky than weathered, Heffner is oblivious to cliché and sees only with a fresh pair of eyes.

"Scoop44 is poised to serve as the distinct source of news affecting young Americans, providing a fresh

generational lens," he says. "We'll venture into territory traditionally left ignored."

This sounds new to the young because the American press lost its credibility by kowtowing to the Dubya Bush administration. It failed to do its job. "This is a call," says Heffner, "to reaffirm and honour the Fourth Estate's commitment to dispassionate political journalism. We're striving to emphasise real newsgathering and investigative reporting. That's our challenge, transforming the practice of journalism on the internet as the industry faces massive upheaval."

And then there are his own ambitions. The White House? "I've always been interested," he says with promising alacrity, "in actual governing, in the intersection of the press and politics."

Ethics and ambition are one thing, business is another. Scoop44 comes onto the scene just as America's traditional newspapers crash from lack of readers and lack of advertising: the 150 year old Rocky Mountain News, with its frontier echo of times long ago, printed its last edition just as Scoop44 went up.