Net beats newspapers as news source: U.S. Study

Sixty-one percent Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 per cent who read newspapers. (project smile india)

More Americans get their news from the internet than from either newspapers or radio. But television is still the most popular news source, according to a study released Monday.

The survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 61 percent of Americans got at least some of their news online, compared to 54 percent who listened to radio news and 50 percent who read newspapers. Some 78 percent of respondents said they watched television news.

Most respondents mix and match for their news — with 92 percent saying they get their news from more than one source — combining social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook with radio, TV and newspapers, the report found.

Online users were younger than other news consumers. Some 37 per said they have contributed to the “creation” of news, commented on it online and shared or posted news on sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to the study.

Twenty-eight percent of online users customize their home pages to include news “from sources and on topics that particularly interest them,” the report found.

With 37 percent of cellphone owners using their mobile devices to get news, the report said that news was becoming “portable, personalized and participatory.” Online users tended to “forage widely” but regularly visited only a “handful of different sites,” the report’s authors said. Portals and news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News and AOL were popular, as were the sites of traditional news organizations such as the BBC, New York Times and CNN, the report said.