On their smartphones, Swiss 18- to 25-year-olds scroll through an average of 400 minutes daily—yet somehow manage to spend just seven minutes consuming actual news. That gap, researchers discovered, tells a surprisingly hopeful story about young people's relationship with trustworthy information.
University of Zurich media researcher Mark Eisenegger led the first systematic study examining how young adults obtain information online as part of a broader research initiative on journalism's role in digital behavior. The findings, gathered by tracking actual domains accessed on smartphones by study participants, reveal a generation more discerning than critics might assume. While 170 of those daily minutes go to social media, the seven minutes devoted to professional news outlets suggests intentionality—young adults aren't passively absorbing whatever algorithms serve them.
The most striking discovery is not what young adults consume, but what they deliberately avoid. When researchers matched accessed domains against a comprehensive list of 3,500 national and international news websites, including disreputable sources peddling conspiracy theories and disinformation, they found very few users landing on problematic sites. "For a democracy, this is a key finding: Young adults seem to have a sense of which information sources they can trust," Eisenegger observed. The most-visited news destinations were the commuter tabloid 20 Minuten and Switzerland's public broadcaster SRF, suggesting a pragmatic preference for accessible, established journalism.
The research team—including Adrian Rauchfleisch from Taiwan State University, Pascal Jürgens from the University of Trier, and Karl Aberer from EPFL—identified another positive trend: when political votes approach, young adults increasingly turn to established journalistic news websites. This pattern suggests that despite their light daily consumption, young people recognize the value of credible sources when it matters most.
However, a shadow looms over these encouraging findings. Artificial intelligence is becoming a central news source for 18% of young adults, a share that continues to climb. This shift poses a genuine threat to journalism's future. When readers skim an AI-generated summary and never click through to the original reporting, journalistic outlets lose both reach and revenue—the economic foundations on which quality news production depends. The problem is structural: AI aggregators benefit from journalism's work without channeling readers or resources back to newsrooms.
The seven-minute daily figure might seem dismissive—Eisenegger notes it's not even enough time to watch a complete evening news program—yet only around 2% of young adults spend 30 minutes or more per day with professional news. This suggests a bifurcated audience: a small core of engaged news consumers and a vast majority who dip in occasionally but deliberately. What emerges from this data is not indifference but a kind of filtered engagement, where young adults curate their sources with surprising judgment even as their overall news consumption remains minimal.
The study's real value lies in correcting a damaging assumption: that young people either ignore news entirely or tumble uncritically into misinformation. Instead, Eisenegger's research suggests they navigate digital information landscapes with an intuitive grasp of credibility. The challenge now is not their trust in good journalism, but ensuring that journalism can survive in an ecosystem where trust alone doesn't pay the bills.