CHICAGO — Young adults have a reputation for being connected to one another and disconnected from the news. But a survey has found that mobile devices and social networking are keeping them more engaged with the broader world than previously thought.

They want news, they say, though they don’t always aggressively seek it out — perhaps simply happening upon it on a friend’s online feed. And they want it daily.

The survey of Americans ages 18 to 34, sometimes called the millennial generation, found that two-thirds of respondents said they consume news online regularly, often on a social networking site. Of those, 40 percent do so several times a day, according to the poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute.

It’s been a slowly building trend in news consumption that experts say is trickling up to older generations — and that young people say helps them stay current, even if they never read an actual newspaper or watch the evening news on TV.

“I don’t think people would expect us to know what we know,” says Erica Quinn, a 24-year-old college student in Gainesville, Florida, who participated in the survey. The findings were to be presented Monday in Nashville at the annual convention of the Newspaper Association of America.