On Monday, the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released the findings of a new study which showed that with more and more people now turning to YouTube for news, the Google-owned video-sharing site is fast becoming a major news platform.

According to the study, titled "YouTube and News: A New Kind of Visual News," a 15-month observation – from January 2011 to March 2012

- of the most popular news videos on YouTube has revealed that an increasing number of viewers are turning to the popular site for eyewitness videos whenever there is any major event in the world or a natural calamity.

Going by the Pew study’s findings, over one-third of the most-watched videos during the 15-month period had been contributed by YouTube users; and, though over 50 percent of the news stories came from news organizations, the footage in several official news videos incorporated videos recorded by YouTube users.

Although the number of TV news viewers is still much more than those watching news on YouTube, the findings nonetheless showed that the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment in which professional journalism gets combined with content posted by general public.

Noting that news-sharing on YouTube marks “a new form of video journalism,” Amy Mitchell - deputy director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism – said: "It's a form in which the relationship between news organizations and citizens is more dynamic and more multiverse than we've seen in most other platforms before."