SAN FRANCISCO — Online journalism, with its immediacy and low cost of distribution, was by now supposed to be on the road to burying the print dinosaurs and overtaking the TV broadcast titans.
Evidence of the online journalists' ambitions is everywhere around the Staples Center in Los Angeles this week. Scores of new Web sites occupy colorful booths at the Democratic National Convention's "Internet Avenue." Several have even leased sky boxes. Hundreds of energetic online writers and video producers race hourly to their computers to update the latest bit of unrest or comment on the political scene.
But even as they beat the traditional media with constantly refreshed stories and images, a different verdict is emerging on whether many of today's Web sites will exist to cover the next convention. Despite millions of viewer-readers, almost none of the World Wide Web's roughly 32,000 news sites earn a profit. And there is little prospect that will change in the foreseeable future.
Even prominent, journalistically excellent news sites have seen their fortunes take a nose dive:
* In June, CBS laid off a quarter of its Internet staff. NBC Internet followed suit last week with 170 layoffs.
* Salon.com, a popular and innovative Internet magazine, fired 13 staffers in June--including the founder and editor's wife--to slow its perilous "burn rate" of cash reserves. Salon raised $26.3 million a little over a year ago by selling stock to the public; now $15.6 million remains after it posted a $4.6-million net loss in its last quarter. Its stock, meantime, which had risen as high as $15.13 a share, is trading for $2.
* Stock prices for Salon.com, NBC Internet, TheStreet.com, CNet, Sportsline.com and Marketwatch.com, among the few Web news companies whose shares are traded publicly, have plummeted an average of 77% since last fall.
* The Wall Street Journal's Internet site, which has attracted an almost unheard of 461,000 paying subscribers, has lost money in all but one month of its five years of operation.
* APBnews.com, an award-winning crime-reporting site, raced through $33 million in cash in less than two years before it fired all 140 of its employees in June and filed for bankruptcy protection in July.
It Was Great While It Lasted
Amy Worden, 37, a former reporter for the Washington Post and Associated Press, was among the APBnews casualties.
