AN OPINION piece written by a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley which described his friends' media habits has generated a flurry of interest from media executives and investors.

The investment bank's European media analysts asked Matthew Robson - an intern from a London school - to write a report on teenagers' likes and dislikes and which made the front page of the Financial Times.

His report, which dismissed Twitter and described online advertising as pointless, proved to be "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights", according to Edward Hill-Wood, an executive director with Morgan Stanley's European media team.

"We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers and several CEOs e-mailing and calling all day." He said the report had generated five or six times more responses than the team's usual research. The rapid surge of interest in social networking and messaging sites has prompted speculation that sites such as Twitter or Facebook could be taken over.

But Robson's report, which was sent to Morgan Stanley's clients as a research note last Friday, suggested that such a move would not be wise.

He said teenagers were using more and more media but were unwilling to pay for it.

"Teenagers do not use Twitter," he wrote. "Most have signed up to the service but then just leave it."

He warned that traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers were losing ground. No teenager Robson knew read newspapers regularly since most "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the Internet or on TV". - The Guardian