Stop the Presses…

The Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of national and international news. That’s the axiomatic conclusion of a new survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that proves irrevocably what anyone with even a passing interest in the news business has known for some time now.

Of the 1,489 adults surveyed by Pew, 40 percent identified the Internet as their primary source for national and international news. Thirty-five percent identified newspapers and 70 percent identified television.

And that’s not all that surprising, is it?

Indeed, given the big news stories of 2008–the presidential election, the econalypse–it’s surprising the Internet didn’t skew even higher in the survey results simply because of people monitoring the presidential campaign or monomaniacally tracking the stock market’s plunge into the abyss. Of course, it will continue to skew higher in the years to come, and markedly so as the ink-and-paper generation declines and the keyboard-and-browser generation continues to rise. But it will be the newspapers driving that change because often, it’s their original reporting that we find ourselves reading on the Web. As one commenter noted over at News.com, “Newspapers are the assignment desks for broadcast and Web media outlets. Who is going to perform the basic grunt work of journalism after the newspapers are gone?”