Research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that 51% of people on social networking sites say that on a typical day they learn of news from people they follow, and that 23% of those people follow or are connected to news organisations or individual journalists.

This is hugely reflective of the fact that news, once distributed primarily by broadcasters and printed media, is now being seeding at grassroots level by individuals, then shared with friends.

No wonder then that amount of Americans relying on printed newspapers as a source of news is declining, and that the Internet is in fact the third most popular vehicle for daily updates (with 61% saying they access news sites regularly), just behind national and local news outlets.

This behaviour is not exactly all-encompassing though, as 92% of Americans turn to multiple sources for their daily news fix – perhaps watching CNN in the morning, news on the radio during their drive to work, a newspaper over lunch and breaking stories at their desks. And when surfing for stories, most people visit only two to five sites daily and 65% say they do not have a single favorite news Web site.

The study also reported that people increasingly want their news to be portable and customisable. For example, Pew found that 33% of mobile phone users read news on their phones, and 28% of Internet users have use tools like Netvibes to customise their home pages.

Pew’s study said that: “To a great extent, people’s experience of news, especially on the Internet, is becoming a shared social experience as people swap links in e-mails, post news stories on their social networking site feeds, highlight news stories in their Tweets, and haggle over the meaning of events in discussion threads,” the report noted. “For instance, more than eight in 10 online news consumers get or share links in e-mails. The rise of the Internet as a news platform has been an integral part of these changes.”

Image via Guardian blogs.