Morgan Stanley teen intern on peers' media use

Though Morgan Stanley says its report by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson on his friends' media habits got "five or six times more feedback" than its European media team's usual reports, the investment banking firm "made no claims for [the report's] statistical rigour," the Financial Times reports. It did offer clear, "thought-provoking insights" to all the hedge fund managers and CEOs who the FT said called and emailed Morgan Stanley the day of the report's release, but I'm not sure any of the young Londoner's observations would surprise my readers. Robson "confirmed" that teens don't use Twitter (though we've seen one created a Twitter worm to test its security - see this); don't watch much TV or listen to much radio, preferring music-focused social sites such as Last.fm; "find advertising 'extremely annoying and pointless'; and, as in newspapers, "'cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text'" instead of "summaries online or on television." What is interesting in the report is that - at least in the London area - teens' "time and money is spent on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, [Robson] said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone." Sounds like he's talking about Xbox Live and other gaming communities (e.g., those within and associated with virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, maybe). Is that an early warning for mobile phone operators and an indicator for parents that the texting wave may crest at some point? [Meanwhile, here's a US 16-year-old's POV on why teens aren't taken with Twitter. Basically, he suggests they're less in control of who sees their updates in Twitter (I don't think he knows that you can make your Twitter profile private). For Twitter privacy, go into "Account" under "Settings" in the upper right-hand corner of your home page and click "protect my updates" at the bottom of the page so that only people you approve can see them; then click "Save" at the very bottom.]

US tweens prefer to be online

US kids now prefer the Web to television, the New York Times reports. It cites research from search marketing firm DoubleClick Performics showing that 83% of US 10-to-14-year-olds spend an hour or more a day online, compared to 68% of children in the same age bracket who watch an hour or more a day of TV. Interesting note about social networking among members of this age group (most underage for popular social-network sites' Terms of Use): "Performics reported that some corners of the Internet were more popular with the children than others. While 72% of the children online belonged to a social networking site (usually MySpace), 60% of them said they rarely or never read blogs."

Young music fans choosing vinyl

Go figure. Just when we thought that music downloads had pretty much killed off CDs, The Guardian reports that, "in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels" there's a "vinyl revival" afoot in the UK (and quite possibly in the US too). It says two-thirds of all UK singles in the UK now come out on in the 7-inch record format, "with sales topping 1 million. Though still a far cry from vinyl's heyday in 1979, when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes alone sold that number and the total vinyl singles market was 89 million, the latest sales are still up more than five-fold in five years." The Guardian adds that it's not unusual to young people to buy records even with nothing to play them on. It quotes an industry analyst as saying they'll buy the digital version to listen to and the record as art, something tangible in their hands, maybe as a memory of a great concert. Another sign that today's media sharers (as opposed to mere consumers) don't abandon sites, formats, technologies, etc., they just fold new ones into the mix.

US parents on kids' media: Study

Two-thirds of parents are very concerned about the amount of inappropriate content US children are exposed to, but they’re mostly talking about other people’s children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s just-released study, “Parents, Children & Media." Only 20% of parents say their own children are seeing a lot of inappropriate content. The study included a national survey of more than 1,000 parents of kids 2-17 and six focus groups with parents held around the US. In other findings, 65% of parents say they closely monitor their kids’ media use and only 18% say they should be monitoring more (16% say it’s not necessary to monitor their kids’ media use). Where the Internet’s concerned, about 75% of parents “check what Web sites their children have visited, and even more look at how kids are profiled on MySpace and who's on their Instant Message ‘buddy lists’,” USATODAY reports in its coverage of the study, which quotes lead Kaiser researcher Victoria Rideout as saying parents feel they’re getting on top of their kids’ Internet use (yet KNX Radio’s headlines was “Study Shows Many Parents are Clueless when it Comes to their Kids and the Internet”). Kaiser also found that 59% of parents say the Internet is “mainly a positive force in their children’s lives”; only 7% say it’s “mainly negative.” And 73% of parents say they “know a lot about what their kids are doing online,” Kaiser found.