There’s nothing like a year’s end to set the pundits to pondering about the state of their particular industry. And so it is with the news business. On the electronic news side, the big question is how to continue making money with the networks losing ground daily to the cable channels…and then there’s that irritating Internet thing to futz with.

What’s a media mogul to do?

In November, cable viewership topped that of the broadcast networks. It wasn’t a true first-time event, but it was the first time to happen during a major sweeps week. Yikes! Of course, we all knew it was coming, but finally, there it is in black and white. Hey Toto, check it out. Kansas in the rearview mirror! It’s one of several trends combining to change the way television…and television news…operate.

Writing in The Future of Television Forum, Stephen Warley and James Sheridan observed several major factors influencing the current state of affairs for TV, which of course affects TV news. The economy is getting stronger, so there must be money to be made. And broadband is now in 20 million homes. Not to mention the fact that DirectTV could put TiVo  into 10 million homes next year. Yet young male viewers seem to be abandoning network TV in record numbers. They’re on the Internet, of course.

“In 1980, the Big Three Networks commanded 80% of the television audience. Twenty years later, (now the Big Four) the networks’ overall audience has now fallen below 50 percent and continues to slide with each passing year,” say Warley and Sheridan. “On the surface, this is not exactly encouraging when your business model is purely dependent on advertising, which requires the largest amount of eyeballs possible.”

“The catastrophic drop-off is in viewers born after 1945,” argues Jeff Alan in an Op-Ed piece originally published in Television Weekly. “In fact, an in-depth look at the ratings suggests that the popularity of the major anchors and of the evening news format is not something that was ever meant to carry over to the Baby Boomers. The startling conclusion may well be that the evening news was only a transitory phenomenon that had more to do with the particular needs and outlook of the generations born between 1900 and 1945 than anything else.”

Alan has bad news for you if you were planning a brilliant future as a major network news anchor. “Based on the level and composition of their ratings—and understanding that each of the current anchors has built a significant personal ‘following’ that will not automatically flow over to their successors—it is arguable that the evening news broadcasts have now become an anachronism and should be scrapped as soon as the current generation of anchors has retired.”

Okay. So much for the networks. So, which toys are the boys playing with at their computers? Don Kaplan of the New York Post reported recently on Singingfish, the “first search engine that finds specific video-based news reports, commercials, movie clips and audio on the Internet.”

“Singingfish and technologies like it may be the next step towards customizable newscasts—a news program tailored to a viewer’s interests,” Kaplan wrote. “In theory, a viewer could simply search for the video clips they’re interested in and edit them together on their computer in minutes.”

But that prospect is still some years away, Kaplan said, because “most news organizations don’t post much of their telecasts on the Internet.” Why? According to the Singingfish CEO, the network moguls have yet to figure out how to make money with it.

The future may be dim for their successors, but it appears that Tom, Dan and Peter are safe in their anchor seats, for now, anyway.