The rapid growth of smartphones and electronic tablets is making the internet favourite for people seeking news, a report released today said.

News consumption online increased 17 per cent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.

Meanwhile, US local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organisation that evaluates and studies the performance of the press.

The percentage of people who say they get news online at least three times a week surpassed newspapers for the first time. It was second only to local TV news as the most popular news platform and seems poised to pass that medium, too, project director Tom Rosenstiel said.

Local TV news has been the most popular format since the 1960s, when its growth was largely responsible for the death of afternoon newspapers, he said.

'It was a milestone year,' he said.

People are just becoming accustomed to having the internet available in their pockets on phones or small tablets, he said.

In December, 41 per cent of Americans said they got most of their news about national and international issues on the internet, more than double the 17 per cent who said that a year earlier, the report said.

In January, 7 per cent of Americans owned electronic tablets, nearly double what it was three months earlier. Mr Rosenstiel said it was the fastest-growing new digital technology, ahead of mobile phones when they were introduced.

From a business standpoint, however, the growth in internet news consumption has not been harnessed by news companies. The project did not have numbers available but said online ad revenue was expected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time in 2010.

'The news business used to be the intermediary,' Mr Rosenstiel said. 'You needed newspapers and TV stations to reach your customers. In this age, it's the device makers and software developers.'

A long-term viewership decline continues for network news, although the evening news programmes continue to have significantly more viewers than cable news networks.

Cable news viewership was down 14 per cent last year and, for the first time since the project has been tracking it, dropped for each of the three networks - CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

(Read by Nelly Min. Nelly Min is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)