A new study from the Future of the First Amendment finds that half of all high school students get their news from online on a weekly basis. No surprise there as our generation has acquired some technological savvy.

However, those youngsters aren't pointing their browsers toward online newspaper sites. Two-thirds of them grab their news from search engines such as Google, MSN, AOL and Yahoo, while the online papers are only claiming twenty-one percent. You can find more results from the study in this article from the Detroit Free Press.

Even though the search engines and the newspapers pretty much run the same stories, the engines have the kids' eyeballs locked on them. Is it really as simple as 'ease of use' to explain why this is so? I think there's something more, something simple.

I feel that this is a generational preference. The print newspaper is something that, for better or worse, is linked to our fathers, our mothers and the generations that came before our own. This new age of digital journalism - search engines, podcasting, online features, et al - belongs to us. I'm not sure whether to feel good about this or not, because I feel that the best stories can be told straight from on-scene reporters and not by wire copy, which is often used on the search engines' news portals.

Perhaps these kids will indeed eventually gravitate to online paper sites like Jeffrey Cole states in the Free Press piece. But in my opinion, that will only occur if these journalism groups on the Web can constantly improve their technological firepower to do two things: Compete against engines that will surely improve by quantum leaps in the future and not have the new 'gee-whiz' element take away the focus from the actual story itself. Sadly, this is no longer just a battle over which entity does news right. It's also about presentation and the transparency that goes with it.