Earlier this week, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, largely completed one of the most drastic rounds of budget cutbacks at a television news operation in decades, affecting roughly a quarter of the staff. The cutbacks promise to change ABC both on- and off-camera.  For some employees, like the longtime Los Angeles correspondent Brian Rooney, Friday was their last day. Mr. Rooney said his contract expired at “exactly the moment when they needed to shed an enormous amount from the payroll.” In an e-mail message, he compared it to “standing looking straight up when the bomb dropped.”  Personally, he said, the next step is scary. “I’m 58 years old with a wife, two daughters in school and a little dog who likes to be fed. They have cut me loose into the worst economy in my lifetime,” he said.  The business of news is a particularly ugly one these days, and news outlets across the country have trimmed their staffs. But it is exceedingly rare for a newspaper or a network to shed a quarter of its employees all at once, as ABC has done.  For viewers, the effects will be felt on the individual broadcasts, like “World News with Diane Sawyer,” which lost two of its six senior staff members to buyouts. They will not be replaced.  In the future, more segments will be reported, filmed and edited by jacks-of-all-trades, called digital journalists, internally. They may lack the polish that a traditional four-person crew can provide, but they are much less expensive. Sometimes two of the digital journalists will team up for reports.  “We are now, as a work force, becoming much more flexible,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News.”  David Westin, the ABC News president, said that Mr. Banner was having each of his producers trained as digital journalists. But he emphasized that there was still a place for veteran videographers and editors at ABC.  Other changes may be more subtle to viewers. More interviews will happen via Skype, rather than an expensive satellite truck. Prime-time shows will rely more heavily on freelance employees. More assignments will be made from a centralized office in New York, rather than by far-flung bureaus, because some of those bureaus have been severely downsized.  Buyouts were announced in February as the prospect of layoffs loomed, and Mr. Westin made no secret of the fact that they would result in a leaner, smaller organization, a bid for survival in a crowded media landscape.  More than 300 employees were approved for buyout packages. An unknown number were laid off. A person with knowledge of the cutbacks said 22 staff employees were laid off on Tuesday in a final round of cuts, but ABC would not disclose the numbers.  Morale is very low, according to some of the dozen ABC News staff members who agreed to be interviewed for this article. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by ABC to speak publicly.  People are “walking around like they’ve been punched in the gut,” one of the employees said, referring to people still with jobs.  Mr. Westin acknowledged in an interview on Friday that “this is a difficult time for everybody at ABC News, not least for the people who are leaving.”  “At the same time, we really are looking forward to the future,” he said.  Inside ABC News, it is widely believed that the cutbacks were mandated by Disney. The cuts came shortly after CBS News, one of the other three network news divisions, lost about 70 staff members. The third division, NBC, is in a much better financial position because it has a cable news arm, MSNBC.  Amid the buyout and layoff process, there has been widespread speculation about a potential pairing between ABC News and the Bloomberg TV cable channel. The two already share some content. Mr. Westin said ABC regularly talks to Bloomberg and another partner, the BBC, “about whether there are ways we can expand” their relationships, but “there’s no major change that’s imminent.”  Richard Gizbert, a former ABC correspondent who now is host of a weekly media criticism show on Al Jazeera English, said the extent of the cutbacks stunned some former ABC employees. He noted that ABC’s London bureau, which is responsible for covering Europe and Africa and which employed about 100 people in the early 1990s, had already suffered a series of cuts over the years, and will soon employ barely a dozen people.  “Yet there’s no fewer broadcasts,” Mr. Gizbert noted.  (Mr. Gizbert’s contract was not renewed by ABC in 2004, and he lost a lawsuit against the network in 2006.)  Already, some bureaus, like Los Angeles, have been reduced significantly. Along with Mr. Rooney, other departing correspondents include Betsy Stark, Lisa Fletcher and Laura Marquez.  But ABC executives sharply disagreed with suggestions that the news division was throwing up its hands.  “The entire news industry is at a crossroads right now,” Mr. Westin said. In ABC’s case, rather than simply reducing headcount, “this is, ‘Let’s redefine jobs and what people do and what their skills are.’ ”  But to Mr. Rooney, the title of digital journalist is “really a code for cheaper and less professional.”  “Good television news is expensive to do,” he wrote. “The shorter the deadline, the more people and equipment it takes. In the western states in particular, it would be very challenging for one or two people to shoot, write, edit and feed a breaking news story by 3:30 in the afternoon. Wildfires tend to happen in places where there is no cellphone coverage and no Starbucks with free Wi-Fi.” Despite his skepticism about the digital journalist strategy, Mr. Rooney said he believed that Mr. Westin was “trying to save ABC News.”  “I hope they succeed,” he said, “although I like to think they will have a harder time doing it without me.”
Despite the news industryâs troubles, it is rare for a news operations to lay off this many people all at once.