AFP

Washington, Aug 18: News audiences are ditching television and newspapers and using the Internet as their main source of information, in a trend that could eventually see the demise of local papers, according to a new study.

“As online use has increased, the audiences of older media have declined,” Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson said in a report on the year-long study issued by Harvard’s Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, released on Thursday August 16.

“In the past year alone, newspaper circulation has fallen by three per cent, broadcast news has lost a million viewers,” said the study, entitled Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look and News on the Internet.

Meanwhile, the numbers of people using the Internet as a news source have increased — exponentially, in some cases.

Traffic to websites that post news produced by a third source, (including search engines and service providers, aggregators, such as topix.net or digg.com, which use software to monitor and post web content; and blogs) increased between April 2006 and 2007.

Monthly visitors to Digg.com, an aggregator which lets users decide on site content, skyrocketed in 12 months to more than 15 million users. Other online news sources grew modestly, with user rates growing by 14 per cent.