Remember the old TV news tagline when there was breaking news — “film at 11?” You can put that solidly in the cultural dustbin as research numbers show a rapidly expanding push toward online video sites as the place where people first see the news.

According to number-crunchers Hitwise, graphic major news events — like the death of croc hunter Steve Irwin and the hanging of Saddam Hussein — helped spur an almost 200 percent increase in traffic to multimedia news sites in the past year. While the jump is likely of little surprise to NewTeeVee readers, one interesting nugget from Hitwise’s US News and Media report was that market share of the top 10 news and media websites actually decreased by 3.8 percent over the same period, perhaps a sign that viewers are finding and clicking on “non-traditional” news sites instead of just the big broadcast brands. Good news, long-tailers!

Celebrity antics caught on video, like Britney Spears’ litany of shame and the rants of Michael Richards, also accounted for some of the rise in multimedia-seeking traffic. According to Hitwise the market share of the top 20 gossip blogs grew 42 percent from just November of 2006 to March 2007. And as recent events like the Virginia Tech shootings show, online video and user-generated content is more and more becoming the first place to turn to for breaking news views.

The willingness of online news providers, personal or professional, to offer non-censored material may be helping increase the overall number of sites viewers turn to, said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise, in the report. “Search engine results from news video services, video sites like YouTube, and blogs were more likely to contain the information they [viewers] sought, thus hastening the growth of non-traditional news sources,” Prescott said in a statement.