There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how the Web and gadgets like smartphones and tablets will impact traditional news outlets, but new research from Pew finds that tech-savvy news junkies are most likely to give the industry a boost.
People tend to spend much more time on news sites, visit more pages, and return more frequently when they are accessed from smartphones and tablets rather than desktop or laptop computers, according to Pew Research Center's annual State of the News Media report.
"Taken all together, the growing body of data suggests that the move toward mobile holds some promising options for news producers, including increasing the amount of overall news being consumed," Pew found.
Laptop/desktop use still dominates at 54 percent, but about 23 percent of people access news on at least two devices - smartphone and laptop, for example, a tablet and a smartphone, or all three.
The news is also good for established news organizations. "The reputation or brand of a news organization, a very traditional idea, is the most important factor in determining where consumers go for news, and that is even truer on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops," Pew said in its survey, which included interviews with 3,000 people.
Despite the rise of social media, meanwhile, sites like Twitter and Facebook are not yet driving record traffic for news sites. Only about 9 percent of respondents said they got a news recommendation from a social media site "very often."
That being said, Facebook currently drives twice as much traffic to news sites as Twitter, while news referrals from social media sites have increased 57 percent since 2009. Accessing news via social media sites is also more popular among smartphone and tablet users than desktop/laptop users.
At this point, 77 percent of U.S. adults have a laptop or desktop computer, a number that has remained stable since 2007. About 44 percent of people own a smartphone, while 18 percent have a tablet - which is up 50 percent from summer 2011.
About 52 percent of laptop owners have a smartphone, 23 percent of laptop owners have a tablet, 31 percent of smartphone owners have a tablet, and 13 percent of Americans own a laptop, smartphone, and tablet.