BOSTON -- A new Harvard study says like the cable and broadcast revolutions, the Internet is redistributing news audiences, sending more viewers to some sites that are gaining traffic, and taking away viewers from others, with newspaper sites being particularly hard hit.

The report, released by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, looked at 160 Web sites over a year's time.

It found that traffic to newspaper-based sites has leveled off, although the web sites of nationally known newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are gaining a larger audience.

According to the study, on average, big newspaper site traffic increased by 10 percent over the past year. In contrast, the Web sites of most other newspapers -- whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities -- are losing their audiences.

The Web sites of "brand name" news organizations -- such as CNN, ABC or MSNBC, have grown, as have the Web sites of local commercial television and radio stations, though at a slower pace than that of the "brand names," according to the study.

The research showed that the biggest gains in audience occurred among the non-traditional news providers such as those with search engines, or service providers, aggregators, and blogger sites grew faster on average than the sites of traditional news providers, whether print, broadcast, or cable.

The sites of Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, along with sites such as newsvine.com, topix.net, digg.com and reddit.com, saw large increases in traffic during the past year.

Local newspaper sites were among those most threatened by the increased Internet traffic to brand name sites. The study showed that the Internet is also a larger threat to local news organizations than those with national reputations because it reduces the influence of geography on people’s choice of a news source and they go to the well-known brand name sites that are very familiar.

Even so, the study said, local news organizations are "brand names" within their communities, which can be used to their advantage.