• Financial Times, Monday, July 13, 2009 11:51 AM

Morgan Stanley's European media analysts asked 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson to describe his friends' media habits in a research note. The report they got proved to be "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen," said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the Morgan Stanley team. As The Financial Times' Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson says, Robson "set out a sobering case that tomorrow's consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it."

In the report, Robson said his peers don't watch television regularly, and they would rather listen to advertising-free music on Web sites like Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Instead, they spend their time and money on movies, concerts and video games, he said.

Robson added that teens generally find advertising "extremely annoying and pointless," and that no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text" rather than see summaries online or on television.

Robson also declared that "teenagers do not use Twitter," as updating the microblogging service from mobile phones in Europe costs valuable credit, he wrote, and "they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless."

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