Tracking the Roots of Low News Usage on Smartphones – Do Individual Interests, Political Attitudes, and Media Consumption Habits Affect the Mobile News Use of Young Adults?

Abstract

While democratic opinion formation relies on citizens receiving vitalinformation from the news, an increasing number of people consis-tently consume very little of it. To address this concern, we tracked themobile news consumption of 382 young adults in Switzerland andcombined it with survey data of the participants to determine theeffect of topical interests, political attitudes, and media consumptionhabits on news usage. We found that interest in domestic politics wasa strong predictor of news consumption. Additional predictors withinour 18–25-year-old participant group were age and time spent online.These findings have implications for policymakers; fostering aninformed citizenry may be more effective when targeting the under-lying interest in politics rather than directly attempting to boost newsuse.