WASHINGTON – Some solace for traditional news outlets worried about how to compete with the Internet: A survey finds slowing growth in the number of people who regularly go online for the news.

Almost three in 10 adults, or 31 percent, regularly log in for news, a rate roughly the same as two years ago, according to the survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. People in their 40s were more likely to go online for news than the younger adults.

“The online news audience is maturing and at this point is wider than it is deep,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

“We have as many as 31 percent who say they read news online regularly,” he said. “But they don’t spend as much time doing it as they spend with more traditional media like newspapers, TV and radio.”

The steady decline in newspaper readership over the past decade has leveled off because of readership of newspapers online, the survey found.

“The online editions of newspapers are providing a bit of a life raft for newspapers,” Kohut said. “But it’s a pretty small life raft.”

Just over four in 10 adults said they had read a newspaper, in print or online, the previous day, compared with 58 percent in 1994. The number of people who read a newspaper online only was relatively small, though it has kept the total from slipping further.

The overall level of newspaper readership has kept fairly steady over the past four years, the survey found.