Internet surpasses newspapers in percentage of American readers

Ars Technica reports that a new Pew survey shows that more Americans now get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. This puts the internet into a solid third-place position as sole provider of news, right behind national and local TV stations.

And thanks to mobile Internet and social networking, a significant number of these readers take their news mobile, or help disseminate it via social networks or e-mail. Likewise, the majority of people (59%) still get their news from both on-line and off-line sources.

Only 17 percent said they read the print version of a national newspaper, however, and 50 percent said they read local papers. According to Pew, newspapers were most likely to be read by people who were over 50 or those who don’t own cell phones—yikes.

Of course, the Internet does include the web versions of prominent papers as well as other sites, so this does not necessarily mean the end of such sites as news organizations. But it does remind us that print is going away a lot faster for newspapers than it has been for e-books.