How Do Young Adults Stay Informed Nowadays? 

According to the study, young adults use their smartphones for an average of around 400 minutes per day, 170 minutes of which are spent on social media. By contrast, they spend only seven minutes per day accessing online news on politics, business, culture, human-interest topics, sports and other areas. “That is very little,” says media researcher Mark Eisenegger. “It’s not even enough time to watch an entire evening news program.” 

The most frequently visited news websites were those of commuter tabloid 20 Minuten, followed by srf.ch. Only around 2 percent of young adults spent 30 minutes or more per day consuming news produced by professional journalists. 

In addition to Eisenegger's team, Adrian Rauchfleisch (Taiwan State University), Pascal Jürgens (University of Trier) and Karl Aberer (EPFL) were also involved in the study. For their study, the researchers systematically recorded all domains accessed day by day on smartphones by the participating 18- to 25-year-olds. These domains were then matched against a comprehensive list of 3,500 national and international news websites, including established outlets as well as dubious sources. 

Eisenegger views as positive the fact that very few users accessed problematic news websites that spread conspiracy theories or disinformation. “For a democracy, this is a key finding: Young adults seem to have a sense of which information sources they can trust.” The study also revealed another positive trend: in the run-up to political votes, young adults increasingly turned to established journalistic news websites. 

At present, AI is a central source of news for only 18 percent of young adults, although the trend is rising, says media researcher Eisenegger. He points out that the growing consumption of AI content is undermining journalistic media, because many consumers merely skim the AI-generated answer and do not click on the links to the sources. As a result, journalism continues to lose reach – and with it, revenue.