A new report claims that the days of traditional news media may be over, with TV and newspapers replaced by social media and a variety of online news providers.

Pew Internet’s Understanding the Participatory News Consumer aimed to establish how social media content generation services had altered the landscape of news and media in the digital era. According to their findings, online news providers have become overwhelmingly important to consumption of news in America.

Only 7% of Americans get their news from a single platform on a typical day according to Pew Internet. The majority – 92% – get their news from multiple platforms instead. A variety of sources are used by most people, with some 46% of Americans stating that they get their news from between four and six different media platforms (Local/National radio/TV, web sites, local/national press, social media, etc) on a typical day.

However, it is online news providers that appear to be playing the biggest role in changing news consumption habits. Six in ten (59%) of Americans get their news from a combination of online and offline sources and the internet is now the third most popular platform for such media, behind local and national television – which is much more popular in the United States than in the UK.

Quality content generation still appears to be important to a substantial portion of the online audience. 21% say they routinely rely on just one site for their news and information. A combination of between two and five sources is more popular (57%), with 65% saying that no single site is their favourite source of news. Surprisingly, given this ‘opportunistic’ approach only 11% said they used more than five websites.

Meanwhile, social media has also had an effect on news consumption. The news has always been a social topic and remains so; 72% of Americans say they follow it because they enjoy discussing it with others and 69% say that there is also a social or civic obligation in keeping up to date with the news. To a great extent (50%) it appears that consumers use social consensus to judge what is an important news story.

Given the possibilities of social media in communicating such information, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that this pattern of consumption has continued – if not increased – online. 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts by friends on social networking sites, whilst 52% say they actively share links with other people via those means.

Meanwhile, 37% of internet users say that they themselves have contributed to the online news discourse via social media, either through commenting (25%), tagging content (11%), creating their own response pieces (9%), tweeting (3%) or sharing links on social network hubs (17%).