Visits to the micro-blogging site jumped 131 percent in March to 9.3 million in the U.S., that’s more than5 million users from February, according to data from comScore.

Constant coverage of Twitter in the mainstream news media has no doubt contributed to the site's growing popularity, comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman wrote in a blog post.

It seems you can't get through a typical newscast anymore without some mention of Twitter, Lipsman wrote.

If you watched the news this past week, you might've heard that Newt Gingrich levied criticism of President Obama's response to the Somali Pirate stand-off over Twitter. I mean, we're talking about the highest levels of government here, and a micro-blogging site is being used as a top politician's primary media outlet?

More and more news anchors and news outlets are encouraging viewers and readers to visit their Twitter pages and also post up their videos and photos.

Like it or not, Twitter is quickly revolutionizing the way our entire news ecosystem operates, from journalist to consumer, and blurring the lines in between, he wrote.

Lipsman noted a strong level of overlap among Twitter users and people who visited the Web sites of top media outlets. The average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person, he said. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter.com visitors did so.

Global visits to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up 700 percent from the same time last year, comScore reported earlier this month. Of that, about 4 million visitors were in the U.S.– a 1,000-percent increase.

Twitter was hit with a virus this past weekend, dubbed StalkDaily, which sent spam emails to those accounts affected by it.

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