Analysis of news consumption of students from the University of Alicante

This article aims to contribute with new data to the analysis of how young people access and consume information sources. To this end, we carried out a survey on a sample of students from the Sociology and Advertising degrees at the University of Alicante (Spain), in the academic year 2017-2018. We selected this population because of their privileged position in terms of both access to technology and knowledge about media processes. We analyzed the students' preferences and perceptions regarding media and news content, and how they interact with the news. Our results show that although the majority of the interviewed students prefer to use social media to access the news, they also resort to digital press and television. However, there is a dissociation between preference and degree of trust. In this sense, despite social media are the most popular source of information, they are described as the least reliable.