"Jennings' Death Ushers in Uncertain Era", AP reports, something we've discussed a few times here as well. Here's a segment from the AP copy:

The death of Peter Jennings means an era in television news has ended with stunning swiftness, giving broadcasters the challenge of reimagining the nightly news in an age of instant Internet updates.

Jennings, 67, died Sunday at his Manhattan home. He hadn't been seen by viewers of ABC's "World News Tonight" since announcing in April he had lung cancer.

For more than 20 years, many American television viewers learned the day's news at the dinner hour from either Jennings, NBC's Tom Brokaw and CBS's Dan Rather — covering the Reagan era, communism's fall, O.J. Simpson and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The triumvirate held steady as the world of news changed around them, driven by the spread of cable and the Internet. Today, people can get news headlines simply by flipping open their cell phones.

Brokaw, 65, retired from the "Nightly News" in November, and Rather, 73, signed off in March. With Jennings gone, the days of name-brand anchors serving as the public face of their news networks may be disappearing as well.

"It's a cruel twist of fate in that Jennings was suddenly going to have the network (evening) news to himself after 20 years of long service," said William Lord, a Boston University journalism professor and one of Jennings' producers in the 1980s. "This was going to be Peter's time to reclaim that No. 1 ranking."

Ironically though, as Thomas Sowell quipped last year when Tom Brokaw retired:

During his long tenure as NBC News anchorman, Tom Brokaw took that program from last place among the big three broadcast networks to first place. But he had more viewers when he was in last place, more than 20 years ago, than he had in first place this year. That is because fewer people now watch NBC, ABC, or CBS News. Good!

We concur. Ironically, the media has long known that the days of the big three national anchormen were numbered, along with the era of a single (almost always liberal) big city newspaper having a monopoly on information. Heck, Alvin Toffler predicted such developments 25 years ago in The Third Wave. But instead of planning for this transistion and how they'd play a role in it, big media has done nothing but berate each competitor as they've entered the scene. Now they face the Long Tail of Weblogs and other alternative media. As I wrote earlier this year:

[Hugh] Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", he chortles. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

Happy dining.