What’s happened to the audience for news? Looks like it’s been sliced, diced and spliced.

As newspaper circulation tumbled, network evening news ratings fell, and morning shows slipped, the Web audience may have plateaued. But those who get their news online are going there more often and use of newspaper Web sites is growing. Those are some of the headlines from the recent State of the Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

A thorough reading of the comprehensive report, available online at www.journalism.org leaves one with the overwhelming sense of a news media in turmoil. Yet, the report concludes: “The problems of the news media have worsened, and with that we get a stronger sense than in earlier years that the news industry is beginning to move into the next era – especially to the Internet.”

Here are some of the findings regarding audience, capsulized according to media.

NEWSPAPERS: Circulation losses that have been building over the last 15 years accelerated in 2005. In two years, daily circulation fell 3.5 percent and Sunday 4.6 percent. Meanwhile, newspaper Web sites grew, but at the expense of the print newspaper – economically costly for print publications. The move from paper to online has been strongest among younger readers, even as older print readers are dying off.

Losses have been most severe at big-city metros, in places like Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston and Atlanta. Among the worst hit were the LA Times, down more than 9 percent, and the Washington Post, down 7 percent daily and almost 6 percent Sunday. The three national newspapers – New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal – held steady.

The bright spots for newspaper publishing are in growth and smaller markets.

Interestingly, the McClatchy papers (led by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Raleigh News and Observer) posted better than average circulation. McClatchy recently bought Knight Ridder papers, including the Fort Worth Star Telegram, but plans to sell 12 of the papers in the KR chain. McClatchy is known for commitment to editorial quality and steady investment in newsrooms. Their success bears watching because “it may hint that the more frugal and short-term approach of others was, as some critics charged, a self-fulfilling prophecy toward newspaper decline,” the report states.

INTERNET: About 7 of 10 adults were using the Internet in some way in 2005 -- or roughly 137 million adult Americans – and the vast majority (70 percent) at some time go there for news. The main area of growth in 2005 was in regularity. One-third of Internet users go there for news everyday. Analysts predict continued growth because of teenagers, racial and ethnic groups and broadband. Online news consumption also appears to be chipping away at TV news viewing as well as newspapers.

Following extraordinary growth in 2004, blog readership slowed in 2005, although the number of blogs, representing a citizen-based form of journalism, continued to grow. The next big question is whether blogging can make money by becoming a substantial ad platform, according to the report.

NETWORK NEWS: Ratings for the network nightly newscasts (with the exception of CBS News) continued to fall in 2005, another six percent, which is an acceleration of the pace of decline in recent years. It translates into overall viewership on the three commercial nightly newscasts of 27 million viewers, or a decline of some 1.8 million viewers. A major factor is the age of the audience; the median age is roughly 60. Still, the notion that these newscasts are dying is clearly exaggerated. Twenty-five years after the onset of CNN, the network nightly news audience still accounts for the largest number of people watching news at any one time. The impact of new faces in the anchor chairs and the reconfiguring of the nightly news has yet to be assessed.

Meanwhile, morning news ratings, flat in 2004, slipped by 4 percent. The median age for the three major morning shows is 53. And the audience for prime-time magazines – at least for those that survived – was stable.

CABLE TV: The big news in cable continues to be Fox. Fox commands more than half the cable news audience – 55 percent daytime and 59 percent prime time – and is the only one of the three main cable channels that is growing. CNN remains the leader in cumulative audience, or the number of different people who watch over the course of a month. And CNN’s Headline News now exceeds MSNBC as the third most watched channel.

OTHER: The report also looks at local TV, magazines, radio and ethnic/alternative publications. By the end of 2005, the XM and Sirius satellite radio networks had some 9 million subscribers, a big increase from the previous year but still tiny compared to the 247 million listeners of traditional radio (which is heavy on talk). Meanwhile the number of Americans who had listened to an Internet radio station grew from 5 to 15 percent. Podcasting, in which people download audio from the computer to listen to on a portable device, appears to be a boon for news. As an example, podcasts from National Public Radio were regularly making the iTunes Top 100 list.

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