Facebook and Twitter making news social

News is now even more a continuous stream, not a discretely defined daily event

The Web is now one of the essential mediums by which Americans access their news.

Though local and national TV broadcasts still serve as the top places to receive their news, 61% of Americans get at least some of their news online, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

"In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices," reads the report. "The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone."

With people going to so many different sources--local TV, national TV, Web via computer, Web via mobile phone--to receive their news, the act of gathering news has become more involved and more of a continuous stream as opposed to a discrete daily event.

"News is an ongoing process. It's not something than ends," Pew Internet Director Lee Rainie said. "There are people who amplify it or dissect it or figure out what angle was missed. There's much more of an element of the continuous conversation of news."

Of course, the biggest contributor to socialization of news is the social networking experience itself, provided most popularly by Facebook and Twitter.

According to the study, 75% of users receive news via email or posts on Facebook and Twitter and 37% of users report news, comment on posts, or share the story on those sites. Most users access between two and five different sites to read up on the news, with 65% reporting that they don't have one favorite news site.

Only 17% of respondents say they read a national newspaper, which is why newspaper companies are struggling to go digital.