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  OnlineNewsWatch is a blog that follows developments in the ever-changing landscape of online journalism. It is edited by Vera Haller, an assistant professor of journalism at Baruch College.

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The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is out with a new study that found more people get their national and international news from the Internet than newspapers.

According to the study, the Internet has passed all other sources except television as the leading source for national and international news. The center said 40 percent of respondents said they got most of this type of news from the Internet as compared to 35 percent who said they relied on newspapers.

That percentage goes up when looking at just respondents under 30. According to the study, nearly 60 percent of younger Americans rely on the Internet for national and international news. A similar survey taken in 2007 placed that number at 34 percent, indicating that Web sites are consolidating their roles as definitive news sources.

The study doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but backs up these trends with some numbers. The survey was conducted Dec. 3-7 among 1,489 .

I’m always interested when a piece of news-related multimedia grabs people’s attention and becomes a part of the story. This is happening with a segment of  Katie Couric’s interview of Sarah Palin. The clip that’s getting a lot of play is Palin’s rambling response to the CBS anchor’s gentle prodding about her foreign affairs experience. Here’s the clip:

This particular YouTube clip,posted by CBS, had gotten nearly 400,000 downloads when I viewed it four days after it was posted. How is it that this particular clip caught the collective eye? In an earlier era, this interview might have been seen by only the television audience watching on the night it was aired. We live in a time when what you say can stay with you for a long time.

With the 2008 Summer Olympics set to start tomorrow in China, it’s worth a look at how this big event is being covered on the Web. NBC, which will televise the games, has gone all out with a monster site. It has updated news, video, photos, bios of athletes and individual pages for most sports.

The network also is offering viewers the chance to sign up for live video feeds and has an online Olympics game that people can play every day while the games are going on.  The site includes a lot of corporate. For example, Target sponsors a section with “inspirational stories” from the Olympics while Nissan sponsors a “drive to the finish” section that includes video and stories about dramatic finishes in track and field events.

Some may find all this corporate sponsorship a bit much, but I find it heartening to see so much advertising on the site.

Check out NYTimes.com’s Olympic event tracker. It’s not the prettiest feature, but it is very functional, allowing viewers to track events in their favorite sports. 

A new report about the state of the newspaper industry doesn’t hold a lot of news. The survey of editors by  Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism includes an oft-repeated take on the situation — smaller staffs, more focus on local news, less national and foreign news and a younger, more Web-savvy newsroom.  The report, called “The Changing Newsroom,” is very direct about the uncertainty editors feel about the future, especially how shrinking ad revenue will affect their ability to do their jobs. Here’s a quote:”The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.”I guess the only sure thing about “The Changing Newsroom” is that there will be change.   

 Anyone who has followed the news on television knows that decisions can be influenced by the type and quality of video that reporters bring back to the newsroom. For example, dramatic footage of a car accident or a police chase might make the air even if there is not much of a story to back up the video.The Web is no different. Yesterday, any number of news sites with a national reach had links on their homepages to video that an amateur videographer took of a near plane crash at Germany’s Hamburg airport.

Fox News and The New York Times in its blog, “The Lede,” were among those with stories and links to the video. When I looked on Google News for the story today, I found 247 links.

While the video is dramatic (it shows the plane wobbling and almost crashing right near the runway and then swooping up again), the incident would never have made news if that person with the video camera hadn’t been taping the landing.

The plane ultimately landed safely. No one was injured. So was it news? This story illustrates how – in the digital age — a good video clip can make news, not just on a local TV news station but on news outlets around the world.

Blogs are good for many things, among them giving journalists a forum to focus on a particular subject. This blog is an example. It gives me the opportunity to write about changes in the news business.

Blogs also allow journalists to tell the story behind the story, to go into detail or to shoot off on a tangent in ways traditional news stories wouldn’t allow. The Iraq story has spawned many a journalist blog – most of them offering up painful stories of life behind the headlines. The New York Times is the latest to launch such a blog, Baghdad Bureau. The item I read, about a platoon of U.S. soldiers about to go home, provided vivid reporting with photos and audio clips from individual soldiers.

In another such blog, Baghdad Observer, McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel recently posted a poignant item about the isolation felt by the 13-year-old son of an Iraqi  colleague. The NBC News bureau also blogs at Blogging Baghdad.

The war also has inspired non-journalists to write. Take a look here at a directory of blogs and diaries from Iraq compiled by Yahoo.

What is sometimes lost in discussions about the current state of the news industry is how the shift to the Web has created opportunities for powerful storytelling. The ability to report using words, images, video and audio means news organizations can draw people into a story like never before.

To find compelling coverage on the Web, take the story in Kenya. For many people in the United States, a news story from Africa may seem remote and, perhaps, not of the highest interest. But spend time on the YouTube channel created by NTVKenya, a television news station, and the importance of the story will be driven home. There are heartbreaking reports such as this one about children being separated from their families because of the violence.

Other interesting Web coverage is being done by a young photographer/blogger, Lameck Nyagudi, whose photos are featured on the BBC’s Web site.  Nyagudi also has a blog and supplies photos to africanews.com.