Politico publisher Robert Allbritton is launching a new local Washington, D.C., news Web site, according to a memo published in the Huffington Post.

Former washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady will head this project, which aims to harness the power of the Internet as a news outlet, the memo said.

The project will involve a merger of the existing WJLA.com and News8.net Web sites into a site with a staff of more than 50 people, the memo said. This will not, however, involve a decrease in activity of WJLA, NewsChannel 8 or Politico, a news service focusing on national politics.

“I think [the Web site] has a good chance of succeeding,” said Scott Anderson, a former employee of Brady and current Web communications manager in the Georgetown Office of Public Affairs. Success, he added, will depend on the staff’s ability to publish news that people are interested in reading. While The Washington Post covers a broad array of news, it does not have the staff to report on a hyper-local level in the way that this Web site could, Anderson said.

Anderson said that this development could be part of an overarching trend in journalism away from printed news and towards Internet-based sources. Daily news simply makes more sense in an online format, he added, though he does believe there to be a print market for more detailed coverage of specific issues.

“The traditional news markets are fragmenting,” Anderson said.

These trends have an impact on the careers of current college students who are interested in pursuing journalism. Their path will be less clearly defined, and future journalists will need to be more entrepreneurial, Anderson said. He is teaching a class in Spring 2010 entitled Online News Writing and Production.

But the younger generation may well be in a position to provide some of the skills needed to augment the growing number of Internet news outlets.

“They can help newsrooms deal with some of the changes that are being pushed by new technology,” Athelia Knight, an English department journalism professor, said.”