One reason, along with our collective love affair with small screens, is we prefer to read news stories rather than watch videos.

The increasing addiction to mobile phones is a key finding in a report on Australians' digital habits to be released in Canberra on Wednesday.

Local news scores the highest points, followed by international news and crime, but we are not as in love with the antics of celebrities as the tabloids' coverage would suggest.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that while 38 per cent of the 2021 respondents paid for a newspaper in the week before the survey, only 10 per cent paid for digital news in the past year.

The University of Canberra's News & Media Research Centre was the Australian partner in the report, a global survey of news consumption led by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

Last year's first report in this series said Australians use smart phones for news more than any other nation.

Facebook continues to rule the social media landscape in all the countries surveyed this year, both for general social networking as well as specific news access.

Australian (27 per cent), British (29 per cent) and Finnish (30 per cent) respondents used tablets for news access more than any other country.

In Australia, three-quarters of the people in the survey cited "mainstream news" as their main source.

However, almost half of younger people preferred non-mainstream while more than 90 per cent of those over 65 years preferred mainstream.

Terrestrial TV and social media were reported by respondents as the most popular sources of news.

When asked for one main source of news, 37 per cent said TV, 27 per cent replied online news and 18 per cent said social media.

The top source of news among online media was through the websites or apps of newspapers.

For watching online news videos, Australians preferred computers over smartphones.

The main reason given for not watching online news videos was inconvenience rather than cost.

"While the penetration of smartphones has plateaued, people are spending more time on their mobile devices," the report says.

"An average [Australian] adult spends 35 hours per month on smartphones and engages in 199 sessions per month which is four times that of people using computers.

"The way people use digital devices has [a] significant impact on how they consume news and information. The majority of respondents accessed news on their mobile devices."

The focus of this year's report is trust in news – or the lack of it.

The report's lead author, Associate Professor Jerry Watkins from the University of Canberra, says: "Some insiders assure me that the low level of trust that Australians have in news sources, news organisation and journalists is an accepted feature of the news environment.

"[Report contributor] Caroline Fisher goes so far as to suggest that lack of trust in news is a healthy by-product of a growing of 'media literacy' in consumers."

Professor Watkins says Australians usually do not pay for news content and are increasingly turning to ad-blocking software.

"News Corp Australia is among those major players moving to force consumers to deactivate ad-blockers in order to access content," he says.

"This is without doubt a risky strategy and it remains to be seen whether this will further encourage users to use their social feeds to receive news.

"Over half of the respondents to this year's Australian survey indicated that social media were their main source of news, just behind terrestrial TV."