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Mar. 2, 2010

According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, a little over a quarter of wireless users in the U.S. now get their news on their smartphones.

The report was released by the group late yesterday and offers another sign of how people are changing the way they read information and current events that affect them.

The research firm doesn't have any comparable data for two or three years ago, however. But evidence of the shift in habits can be seen in this finding: Younger mobile phone owners are more likely to look for news on their smartphones.

Almost half of users under age 50 said they are mobile news consumers, compared with about 14.9 percent of older respondents.

But readers' number one concern when they look for news on their phones is still the weather, however. Of the 36.7 percent of all mobile phone owners who said they use the Internet on their smartphone, over 71.9 percent said they check weather reports.

Current news came in rather close with 68.2 percent, however. And Pew expects the trend to continue, as more and more users get new iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones.

The Internet is also helping to turn the news into more of a social experience: Pew says that about 80.8 percent of all respondents read their news via e-mailed links and various news feeds scattered all over the Web.

Overall, technology has been reshaping the news business and the way consumers relate to it for more than ten years already. And this latest trend is being accelerated by the exploding popularity of smartphones that can easily access the Web from anywhere.

Pew's new study offered a wider range of statistics on people's news habits than ever before, according to the company. It also demonstrated that users are not just relying on one medium alone.

In fact about 58.9 percent of all respondents say they read their news from both online and offline sources.

About 46.2 percent of people said they use 4 to 6 different types of media on a typical day.

These results were based on phone interviews with 2,260 wireless users over the age of 18.

The survey was performed between December 28, 2009 and January 19, 2010. For the questions that were asked to the entire group, the margin of error was about 2.4 percentage points.

On questions to just Web users, the margin was approximarely 2.8 percentage points.

In the coming months, similar surveys are expected to be done by a few more research firms. We will keep you posted on the new numbers as well.

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Source: Pew Research Center.