Call it “Note withdrawal.”

Just as the political season is heating up, operatives, analysts, and even reporters are left scrambling for their fix of the daily Internet news roundups that detail every hiccup on the presidential campaign trail and on Capitol Hill.

Three major television networks have announced shake-ups in their political units in the last few months. Most dramatically, a recent change at ABC was quickly followed by a downsizing of the network’s must-read insider daily political news summary the Note.

The chief author of the Note, Mark Halperin, stepped down as ABC’s political director last week. The Web site has now replaced the Note with an abbreviated “Mini Note.” Mr. Halperin’s opinionated voice and detailed summaries have been replaced with a bare-bones list of headlines.

“It’s on par with having your morning coffee taken away,” a Democratic political strategist, Daniel Gerstein, said. “Nothing is ever going to be pitch-perfect, but I think one of the reasons it has thrived is it has had a voice. It has not been sort of this generic digest.”

A political analyst at the Cook Political Report, Jennifer Duffy, said that between the downsizing of the Note and a temporary hiatus of NBC’s First Read roundup, a hole has been left in the daily routines of those who obsessively follow the ins and outs of politics. “For people in politics, and on the Hill, and on K Street it’s a quick way to stay plugged into what’s going on,” she said. “One of them needs to come back soon.”

Groused Mickey Kaus, who blogs for Slate.com, “ABC’s once-indispensable the Note appears to have collapsed.” Mr. Kaus observed that the site “has lost about 90% of its character” — which he described as “Halperin’s annoying, absurdly self-confident insiderism” — since Mr. Halperin moved on.

The Note was the subject of a front page news article in the July 29, 2002, New York Sun, which quoted the national political reporter for the New York Times, Adam Nagourney, as saying the Note was the only thing he reads more carefully than his own newspaper. The 2002 article put the Note’s daily readership at 13,000.

Mr. Halperin’s replacement, David Chalian, who has been at ABC since 2003, said yesterday the network had been discussing how to “evolve the Note for the 08 cycle” for the last six months, well before Mr. Halperin decided to step down.

The Note, he said, would undergo more changes in the coming weeks. He said it would it will retain its signature characteristics, including links to political news stories, a daily listing of political events, and analysis.

“The Note is Mark Halperin’s brainchild and his baby,” Mr. Chalian asserted during a telephone interview. “Anything we do in changing it and renovating it will always have his DNA.”

He said ABC is simply rethinking how to cover the 2008 presidential cycle in the digital world.

“Before we knew there would be changes in personnel we all sat down and said ‘How should the Note change and evolve for the 08 cycle,'” Mr. Chalian said. “Now makes perfect sense in terms of timing to go ahead and start changing it.”

Mr. Halperin declined to comment.

The changing of the political guard at ABC comes just weeks after NBC’s new political director, Chuck Todd, started, and about six months after Molly Levinson took over the political unit at CBS.

Just a few days before Mr. Todd walked through the doors at the network, NBC notified its readers that the morning edition of First Read would be taking a “short breather and will return under new management.” The political staff there is still posting a regular stream of blog entries, but has suspended the electronic roundup linking to political news stories.

Yesterday, Mr. Todd, who until taking over at NBC was the editor of the political news service the Hotline, said that electronic roundup would be back later this week or early next week. He said NBC is actually thinking of adding a second afternoon or evening update.

“I think everybody is competing for relevancy and everybody’s competing for eyeballs,” said Mr. Todd, who started at NBC on March 14.
At the Hotline he said: “I was always telling my staff if they came to me with an idea, careful if you start it because once you start you can’t stop. It’s amazing the expectations people get very quickly. We’re not going to stop. It’s like anything, out of sight, out of mind and we certainly don’t want to be that here at NBC.”

Ms. Duffy said while the Note, which started as an internal memo at ABC, was the trailblazer among political news sites, taking out the “snarky side comments” and shortening it could improve it. Some observers have noticed the digest slimming down in recent months.

Mr. Chalian said he was confident that regular readers of the site would remain devoted. When asked for specifics on how the site would change, he invoked the hallmark television mantra: “Stay tuned.”