— A new survey released today by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force at Harvard University shows a strong movement in America’s classrooms toward the use of Internet-based news and away from the use of newspapers and television news, a trend that is virtually certain to continue.

The study also shows that teachers, as they have moved to the Internet, have switched from using hundreds of local news outlets to making use of a small number of national ones. Internet-based news in the classroom is dominated by the websites of a few top news organizations including CNN, PBS, and The New York Times. In fact, the classroom use of non-U.S. websites, such as BBC’s, even exceeds the use of local TV or newspaper sites.

The report is based on parallel national surveys of over 1,250 social studies, civics, and government teachers in grades 5 through 12, as well as several hundred Newspaper-in-Education (NIE) program directors at daily newspapers.

The Carnegie-Knight Task Force, launched in 2005, is a group of America ’s leading scholars on journalism dedicated to research on policy and education issues. The report, The Internet and the Threat It Poses to Local Media: Lessons from News in the Schools, is the second study from the Carnegie-Knight Task Force, whose research arm is based at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard University ’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The survey of teachers showed that half are making greater use of news today than they were a few years ago, an increase attributable to developments outside the school such as the war on terrorism and the fighting in Iraq . But not all sources of news are doing equally well in the classroom. Internet-based news has supplanted that provided by local newspapers and by national and local television outlets.

“Since the nation’s founding, the community story—as told by local newspapers—has been an everyday part of Americans’ experience,” said Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University, who directed the survey. “In America ’s classrooms, this story is shrinking as a result of teachers’ preference for Internet-based news.”

For over 20 years, hundreds of large and small U.S. dailies have provided free or reduced rate copies of their newspapers for classroom use by students through the Newspapers-in-Education program. Touted as a means of improving students’ reading, spelling, and writing skills as well as contributing to civic education, it has also been a way to encourage students to become lifelong newspaper readers.

“In America ’s schools, local newspapers are losing out to the Internet,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center and a member of the Task Force. “We need to start rethinking how the NIE program can be most effective and how to bolster local media in the classroom.”

Patterson noted that some local newspapers have attempted to counter the challenge from the mainstream national and international sites. Within the past two years, the Denver Post and the Louisville Courier-Journal launched “e-editions” of their papers for classroom use, and more recently, the Idaho Press-Tribune began a program that aims to get its e-edition into half of the middle and high schools within its circulation area.

The survey also finds that among teachers now making use of news, 67 percent claim “the Internet has made news use in the classroom easier and better,” and their media choices further reveal the Internet’s dominance. Fifty-seven percent of the teachers surveyed say they frequently use Internet-based news in the classroom — roughly twice the proportion using national television news or the daily newspapers on a frequent basis.

The teachers surveyed were randomly sampled from Market Data Retrieval’s list of more than 30,000 social studies, civics, and government teachers and were contacted through the Internet over a two-month period in the fall of 2006. In addition, over 250 NIE program directors were surveyed during the same period to discover what their newspapers were doing to promote classroom use of the newspaper.

“We found that newspapers are only dimly aware that they are losing ground in the classroom,” said Patterson. “In fact, very few are making a substantial effort to promote their websites in the schools. They continue to market the hard copy of the newspaper, despite evidence that many of today’s young people are not interested in it.”

Earlier this month the Carnegie-Knight Task Force released its first report, Mandatory Testing andNews in the Schools: Implications for Civic Education, which examined the use of daily news in the classroom and how this use is affected by standardized testing.

The Carnegie-Knight Task Force is one element of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. It focuses on developing a vision of what journalism schools can be at major universities. The Task Force aims to carry out research and create a platform for educators to speak on policy and journalism education issues. All these efforts grew out of a partnership involving the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the deans of four of the nation’s leading journalism schools — Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley; Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University; John Lavine, Dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California — and Alex S. Jones, Director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Carnegie-Knight Task Force members are Orville Schell, Nicholas Lemann, John Lavine, Geoffrey Cowan and Alex Jones.

Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic foundation created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of the United States . For more information about the Corporation, go to www.carnegie.org. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. For more information about Knight Foundation, go to www.knightfoundation.org.

The full report can be accessed at www.shorensteincenter.org