The fact that the internet has transformed news into a social experience - with users actively contributing to the news itself, commenting on it and disseminating it through various online means - has made internet surpass newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get news. The findings of a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report reveal that American news consumption landscape has undergone a sea change with newspaper and radio, once the greatest news sources, having been overtaken by today’s most formidable information medium: the internet.

“In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices,” says the report. As opposed to the traditional news media like newspaper and radio, internet not only offers readers hundreds of online news sources to choose from, it also makes the stories highly engaging by means of interactivity features and sharing options. Readers instantly post their comments on news stories and easily disseminate them by sharing links to news stories by e-mail, posting articles on Facebook and other networking feeds and tweeting them on Twitter etc – those “e-mail a friend" or "post to Facebook" links apparently work well. Thanks to a range of nontraditional consumption methods available online, such as social media postings, personalized news feeds, and news on-the-go, the popularity of the internet as a highly effective news medium is continuously on the rise.

Although national and local TV stations still dominate the news cycle for most Americans according to the report’s findings, the Internet now stands third in the list, ahead of national and local newspapers. But unlike the newspaper readers, a majority of online news consumers use two to five websites per day to get their fix. “The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone,” says the report. Still, 21% of online news consumers rely on just one website to get everything they want.

The report also reveals that most of the online news consumers also use traditional (offline) sources simultaneously, meaning a combination of both online and offline sources.

Americans today routinely get their news from multiple sources and a mix of platforms. On a typical day:

• 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms
• Just 7% get their news from a single media platform
• 78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station
• 73% say they get news from a national network such as CBS or cable TV station such as CNN or FoxNews
• 61% say they get some kind of news online
• 54% say they listen to a radio news program at home or in the car
• 50% say they read news in a local newspaper
• 17% say they read news in a national newspaper such as the New York Times or USA Today.

“In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory,” says the report. These new metrics stand out:

• Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

The report’s findings show that the internet has clearly surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a news platform on a typical day and now ranks just behind TV. Now that news consumption has become a socially-engaging and socially-driven activity online, the decline of newspapers and radio is expected to continue because it’s clearly implausible for the latter to make news as interesting and engaging as does the internet.