A new report says the video-sharing website YouTube is emerging as a major platform for news.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism said Monday a third of the most searched terms on YouTube during the 15 months of the center's study were news-related. Pew's research was conducted from January 2011 to March 2012.

Pew says in the seven days following last year's tsunami-triggering earthquake in northeastern Japan, the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube all focused on the tragedy and were viewed more than 96-million times.

Pew says what people saw in those videos represented a “new kind of visual journalism” with most of the footage recorded by eyewitnesses who found themselves caught in the tragedy. Some of the videos were posted by the eyewitnesses, but most were posted by news organizations incorporating user-generated content into their news offerings.

The report says while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.