Search engine traffic to new sites continues to rise

Hitwise has released some data on online news trends over the last year. A few interesting facts:

News aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo! News and the Drudge Report continue to be the leading source of traffic for news web sites.
Google and other search engine traffic for news sites is on the rise: in March 2007, print and broadcast news sites received about a third more search engine traffic than in March 2006.
There’s been a huge increase in traffic to multimedia websites, driven in part by news events featuring user-generated video such as the death of Steve Irwin and Saddam Hussein’s execution.
Celebrity gossip blogs seeing huge jumps in traffic, with the top 20 gossip blogs getting major boosts following events related to Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith.