New patterns in news consumption and a deteriorating economy deepened the emerging cracks in the economic foundation of the media in 2008, according to the latest Annual Report on American Journalism from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. While most news media continued to see audience declines - despite the big news year - the Internet and cable television experienced gains.

Driving this change may be the fact that we have become an "on demand" culture - wanting the news we are interested in on our schedule. When you can have news widgets, RSS feeds, podcasts, and any number of online news sources at your fingertips, who wants to wait for the morning paper or the evening news?

A development that is far from shocking is that, while print newspaper circulation is down, digital editions are faring better. While print circulation fell 4.6 % daily and 4.8% Sunday for the latest period compared with a year earlier, traffic to newspaper websites is growing. Unduplicated Web audiences are now estimated to add 8.4% to the average newspaper's readership, making up for most, but not all, of the audience decline. America's newspapers got smaller in just about every way. The study estimated that roughly 5,000 full-time newsroom jobs were cut, or about 10%, in 2008.

Perhaps the bleakest news came in for the American weekly news magazine. Of the eight publications that PEJ tracks as news magazines, circulation dropped 4.8%. Late in the year, several publications announced substantial layoffs, on top of cutbacks in staffing and resources already made earlier. The U.S. News & World Report announced that it would no longer be a print news weekly, converting instead to a monthly focused on its popular rankings of colleges and other consumer topics.

The nation's most popular source for news is still local television, though on a percentage basis it was among the biggest losers of audience in 2008. Just over half of Americans are now regular viewers (52%), according to a survey, down from nearly two-thirds (64%) a decade earlier. Viewership of local evening newscasts, those around the dinner hour, fell by an average of 4.5%, according to an analysis of ratings data by PEJ. Fewer stations reported hiring, and by the end of the year layoffs were accelerating.

A number of specific Web developments emerged in 2008, with much of the expansion and innovation now coming from those outside of traditional news industries, such as user-generated news and citizen news sites. Areas covered by online sites vary widely from cloning TV news programming to focusing on micro-local content or specific industry niches. While innovative and interesting, a successful business case has yet to be made for these emerging news entities.