To people of a certain age, the news earlier this week that ABC could cancel General Hospital to make room for a new talk show hosted by Katie Couric was near-unthinkable. After all, the show has been a cultural icon for decades. In the early 80s, it was a flat-out phenomenon – it made household names of Luke and Laura and launched the music career of cast member Rick Springfield.

This follows, of course, a long stretch of bad news about the genre, including the cancelation of another landmark ABC show, All My Children (aka The Susan Lucci Show). Which begs the question, is one of the longest-running forms of media storytelling ever dead?

Soap operas, of course, predate even television – they started out on the radio, then moved to the video medium. They quickly became known as a training ground for young writers and actors – the number of soap "graduates" who went on to long-running prime-time series, or successful film careers, is legion.

Their traditional audience was usually thought to be homemakers, but their reach went way beyond that – soaps were always favorite viewing in college dorms (especially during the heyday of, you guessed it, Luke and Laura), and even baseball players watched them before games. The move of women into the workplace didn't erode the audience – since the VCR arrived a few years later.

Over the years, the genre also did quite a bit of innovation. Dark Shadows, a massive hit in the late '60s/early '70s, invented the vampire romance genre before Stephanie Myer was a sparkle in her father's eye. Soaps had gay romance storylines more than a decade before Glee.

In recent years, though, the genre has been on the decline. There seems to be a number of factors involved – increasingly busy lifestyles leaving little time to follow a daily series, digital cable lineups offering literally hundreds of daytime viewing choices – but the one that seems to come up most often is reality TV. After all, shows like Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives series offer everything people watched soaps for – larger-than-life people in situations of sex, angst and high drama – with the added kick that this isn't staged, it's all REAL! (Well, allegedly). Goodbye Luke and Laura, hello Situation and Snooki.

So, does this mean the end of this art form altogether? Will young actors, writers and directors have to look for a new proving ground? Not necessarily – like many other forms of old-school media, the soap isn't going away, it's just going online.

The web soap is a new form of the daytime drama. Episodes are a lot shorter than the standard shows – seven or eight minutes (perfect YouTube length) instead of an hour a day – but they revive the old traditions. Some of them are attracting attention, too – one Web soap, The Bay, was acquired by Associated Television International earlier this year (they plan to re-edit the brief episodes togethe and get them on a cable channel).

Web soaps aren't going to make anyone instantly rich and famous, of course – they should be viewed the same as doing iPhone aps (Angry Birds notwithstanding), as a place to practice, get your feet wet and build a reputation and resume. But, like the soaps of old, they do offer the same professional discipline, challenging those involved to keep things fresh, inventive and interesting day after day.

Soaps will probably disappear from network television in the next year or so. But that doesn't mean that people who grew up on them can't keep the suds alive. – Bonnie Walling