News consumption repertoires among Finnish adolescents : Moderate digital traditionalists, minimalist social media stumblers, and frequent omnivores

Abstract

Young people are perceived as heavy consumers of social media and less avid consumers of news. That notion, however, deserves nuance: Many factors, such as the national context, media system, trust in news, intentionally or incidentally encountering news from different sources, and interest in politics, influence how young people consume news. This study explores news consumption among Finnish adolescents through a representative survey of 15–19-year-olds. We seek to answer two research questions: What are the news repertoires of Finnish adolescents? And what factors predict different news repertoires? Latent profile analysis reveals three distinct news repertoires: 1) moderate digital traditionalists, the largest group, embracing traditional news in digital form; 2) minimalist social media stumblers, the second-largest group, tending to consume news infrequently through passive social media encounters and lacking credible information; and 3) a quite large number of frequent news omnivores, taking an interest in diverse news forms and actively seeking them.