Australians pick news over videos on mobiles By Ross Peake We're now spending more than an hour a day staring at our smartphones.One reason, along with our collective love affair with small screens, is we prefer to read news stories rather than watch videos. 
The increasing addiction to mobile phones is a key finding in a report on Australians' digital habits to be released in Canberra on Wednesday.
Local news scores the highest points, followed by international news and crime, but we are not as in love with celebrity antics as the tabloids' coverage would suggest.
Unsurprisingly, the report finds while 38 per cent of the 2021 respondents paid for a newspaper in the week before the survey, only 10 per cent paid for digital news in the past year.
The University of Canberra's News & Media Research Centre was the Australian partner in the report, a global survey of news consumption led by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Last year's first report in this series said Australians use smart phones for news more than any other nation.
Facebook continues to rule the social media landscape in all the countries surveyed this year, both for general social networking as well as specific news access.
Australian (27 per cent), British (29 per cent) and Finnish (30 per cent) respondents used tablets for news access more than any other country. In Australia, three- quarters of the people in the survey cited "mainstream news" as their main source.
However, almost half of younger people preferred non-mainstream while more than 90 per cent of those over 65 years preferred mainstream.
Terrestrial TV and social media were reported by respondents as the most popular sources of news.
When asked for one main source of news, 37 per cent said TV, 27 per cent replied online news and 18per cent said social media.
The top source of news among online media was through the websites or apps of newspapers.