As they do, I'm sure they will grow much more cautiously than some of the operations that failed in the past year. For pure-play Internet sites that have scaled back to reduce costs, much will depend on whether or when they can achieve profitability. But that is probably well into the future. These companies are doing this in part to achieve greater efficiency by not having multiple people working on the same news story. This is not an easy change to make to get a single staff to produce news in real-time for multiple channels and still maintain the quality of each channel, but it is easier to do today than a few years ago as the Internet was just taking off.
Systems make it easier, and the culture of newsrooms is changing.
Another reason for more closely aligning news operations is because the nature of online journalism increasingly requires that thought be given from the earliest stages of developing a story to the other media and interactive aspects of the final news output in multiple formats. The future of digital news, with its need for multimedia and interactive tools, will require continued evolution of news staffs and that will lead to more jobs over time. We will see this occur over the next three to five years as Internet use becomes ever more central to America's mass communications systems. We are beginning to see this trend already in large companies like Fox that are merging their traditional newsrooms and Web newsrooms into a single, coherent operation as their audience comes to expect that the Web sites of media giants will be as dynamic and compelling as their broadcast or print products. We obviously need to get through this period of consolidation and market gloom.