Online news will overtake television network news as the leading news source over the next five years, a study has predicted.
The study, which was presented at the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, also revealed that newspapers will see moderate to significant losses over the same period of time.
According to the report, newspapers need to be able to combine print and online operations effectively if they are to attract new readers.
The study was conducted by Harris Interactive in conjunction with the Innovation International Media Consulting Group.
It found that 23 per cent of people in the UK, the US and Australia relied on newspapers for their news.
This figure was 29 per cent in Spain, 22 per cent in Germany, 21 per cent in Italy and just 16 per cent in France.
Television news was the primary source of news for about 37 per cent of adults in the seven countries surveyed.
Looking ahead, the study suggested that the popularity of online news and information would jump significantly in all geographies over the next five years.
The report, which was conducted in May, found that newspapers must remove their bias to improve their credibility.
While local will always matter to a reader, there appears to be a new and urgent need for worldwide news, it added.
In recent years, traditional newspaper publishers have faced stiff competition for advertising spend from the internet.
Online advertising expenditure in the UK climbed 41.2 per cent to £2.01bn in 2006, while spending on national newspaper ads grew by just 0.2 per cent to £1.9bn, figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) show.
This rapid growth has increased the internet's share of all advertising revenues to 11.4 per cent, up from 7.8 per cent in 2005.
Newspapers' total market share stands at just 10.7 per cent, down from a massive 41.5 per cent in 2004.
The IAB attributed the growth in online advertising to a surge in the number of homes using high-speed broadband.
And looking ahead, the IAB predicts that internet advertising will continue to grow strongly over the next twelve months.
Online advertising expenditure in the UK was £653.3m in 2004 and £407.8m in 2003.
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