Good news for people (entrepreneurs!) like myself: increasingly more Americans are turning to the Internet for news. That’s, of course great because it means that more Americans are likely to read my drivel (and of course the high quality posts of my co-bloggers), but it’s also great because America often sets the trend globally.

In other words: if more Americans turn to the Internet for news, it’s likely that Europeans will follow suit.

The Internet has become the primary source for news for nearly 50% of Americans. That’s almost 10% up compared to only a year ago. This makes the Web the most popular news source of all: television follows with less than 33%, radio is third with only 11% and newspapers, I’m sure you’ve heard of them (they used to read them in the 19th century) fourth with 10%.

One of the reasons given (by Reuters) for this development is that approximately 70% of Americans “believe traditional journalism is out of touch.” On top of that, “64 percent are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.”

But, Howard Finberg, of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida who is quoted by Reuters, says: these Americans are seemingly naive or uninformed because they don’t seem to understand that “the sources they are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources.” In other words, how’s the Internet better?

Well, Mr. Finberg doesn’t understand something: he seems to think that people turn to the Internet and then read the normal articles at, say, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The reality is, however, that many peoples end up at blogs such as this one. Yes, bloggers often use material provided by newspapers and networks, but they’re also giving their own take on the situation and they´re often combining reports of one organization with reports of another one. In other words, they do fact checking, they do opinion and they do analysis.

O, and they put the news into perspective.

That’s seemingly ignored by Finberg et all, as well as by traditional media outlets. Until they learn this lesson, they’ll lose readership while websites like this thrive.