It is hardly news that newspapers everywhere are grappling with the challenges of the Internet, but the ways in which The Daily News has approached this wrestling match have left some members of its staff worried that the paper has betrayed its mission in exchange for digital clicks. It was not just the bloodletting in the feature, sports and business pages, which, people noted, were some of the paper’s most beloved sections; several employees said that The News’s top executives, in their scramble for solutions, had made the paper more down-market and sensational — a tepid imitation of the Post.

“The mantra in the building is web, web, web,” said one reporter who lost his job this month. “But they haven’t figured out how to monetize the web yet. And so it just gets trashier and trashier in an effort to juice the numbers.”

Mr. Zuckerman insisted that The News would continue to cover the city with the same deep sourcing and doorstep reporting it has always used, not least because New York, he said, is a subject that intrigues the world. But in the wake of the layoffs, in tearful and occasionally drunken conversations, his troops expressed concern that the culture of the paper had irreparably changed.

“When I first got to The News, it was about all reporting and writing, but now it’s about self-promotion,” said one former veteran reporter. “I can’t remember the last time someone on the staff sent a note saying, ‘Hey, good piece.’ What they say now is, ‘Hey, we broke the March record for page views!’ ”

While one can scarcely ascribe this trend to The News, that it has infiltrated an institution that by tradition was built on gin and shoe leather raises the question of just how many of the young web surfers at Mr. Holiber’s aggregation shop would recognize the names Pete Hamill or Jimmy Breslin (hint: check Google). “That’s all over and done with,” Mr. Hamill said the other day when asked about the city’s tabloid epoch. “I looked at The News’s website today and you know what the lead was? O.J. Simpson. The pope’s in town. John Boehner just quit. And they lead with O. J.? These jerks piss me off.”

That, in case you missed it, was tabloid culture: caustic anger in the service of civic ideals. It could be said that The Daily News is, or was, the last vestige of that culture in New York. The New York Times has its own empyrean style and several years ago ended its stand-alone New York section, moving local coverage into the A section, with the paper’s national and foreign reports. As for The Post, it is hard to know what the paper cares about aside from sex, gossip and the shifting whims of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.