“We found that most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,” he said. “Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren’t acquiring the news habit.”

The survey went a step further to see what the respondents meant when they said that they did pay attention to the news. Those results, especially among the younger groups, were equally discouraging for the news industry, said Alex S. Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center.

“What we found is that what people mean when they say they are engaged in the news has much more of a glancing, superficial basis than anything we would have hoped,” he said. “Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news.”

The results were especially grim for newspapers. Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.

Despite this, some in the industry say the situation is not hopeless.

Jane Hirt, the editor of RedEye, a free daily newspaper that is published by The Chicago Tribune specifically for young, urban professionals, said that her publication had succeeded and had even expanded its audience by adopting some of the lessons learned from television and the Internet and by experimenting with ways to tell stories.