Freelance budgets have not escaped the national newspaper executives' desperate cuts, and areas like the arts have been particularly brutally hit.

So, when commission rates drastically dropped at the Telegraph arts desk, the freelancers didn't hang about, they joined with other national arts writers to set up a new online website.

The Arts Desk financial model is simple: affiliate sales, advertising and copy sales. It has something of a communal spirit and it's described as a 'collective hub'. There is, however, one overall architect: Ismene Brown, who is managing and running the site.

Journalism.co.uk caught up with Brown via email. She hopes that national newspaper arts coverage will be 'improved and enriched by the new approach'.

[J.co.uk] Why did you decide to operate with so many contributors - how will you manage it day-to-day?

[IB] We all have shared objectives and knowledge as freelance arts writers and photographers, and we wanted to cover the whole range of arts. Our site had to work on a self-sufficient and bare-bones basis involving only people who had the skill, maturity and professional journalistic experience to be self-editing, self-subbing, and self-generating ideas and copy.

And the technology side?

From a technical management point of view, theartsdesk.com also has to be totally automated as a virtual office and cost nothing to license or administer. Hence the site is built on the open-source Google Joomla platform, which enables us to flexibly add or change elements to suit new needs, and many of our processes to feed automatically into each other.

Who are the key people?

We operate as a collective on a 'hub' basis, with each major artform having one person responsible for coordinating reviews and features (art: Mark Hudson; classical music: Igor Toronyi-Lalic; comedy: Veronica Lee; dance: Ismene Brown; film: Sheila Johnston; new music: Peter Culshaw; photography: Sue Steward; theatre: Matt Wolf; TV: Adam Sweeting). An editorial planning eye is cast by Jasper Rees.

What are you hoping the site will achieve?

To become before long the first place to look for arts coverage, both for overnight reviews and for wide-ranging, deep, varied and innovative features. And to prove that the web is a natural home for top quality and creativity in journalism.