The new news junkie looks very different from even five years ago. Now, she is likely to scan the headlines on her phone in the morning, check a handful of different Web sites over the course of the day and click on links that friends have e-mailed or posted on Facebook or Twitter.
That is the picture painted in a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examining how people consume news. Ninety-nine percent of American adults get news each day, but they are getting it from a wider variety of sources and in many different forms.
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Readers are turning to their friends to serve as their editors. People have always read the news in part for fodder for dinner party or water-cooler conversations. Today, conversations about the news are happening all over the Web.
More than 80 percent of people receive or share links in e-mail messages or on social networks. A quarter discuss the news of the day in the comment sections on Web sites.
People want to be their own editors, too. About 40 percent of Internet users said it is important to them that news Web sites let them customize the type of news they get and 36 percent said they like multimedia features, like graphics and quizzes, that they can manipulate themselves.
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