Macalester College sophomore Keri Piepgras can pick up a copy of the New York Times for free at the Campus Center every day, but she doesn't. Instead, she gets her Times delivered to her laptop computer through a high-speed Internet connection in her dorm room.

"I find newspapers bulky," she said. "I just prefer to get it online."

Piepgras, a 20-year-old economics and legal studies major, is one of 50 million Americans who get their news online every day, according to a new study. This is a new high-water mark for online news consumers and one fueled by the explosive growth of broadband connections that make downloading news stories and pictures a snap, the study says.

The Washington, D.C.-based Pew Internet and American Life Project found that over the past four years, home broadband users ballooned from 20 million people, or 10 percent of Americans, to 74 million people or 37 percent.

About 25 percent of the growth of daily online news consumption since 2002 is due to the increase in home broadband adoption, said John Horrigan, the Pew study's author.

"It's always-on communication," he said.”


Many news sites move articles into data bases after a period of time and then offer them for sale, in the process changing the URLs that link to them. Or they require registration. Thus, we provide a link to the front page of the news website and the information necessary to find the story on that site, rather than a direct link to the article.

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