Health news' representation in the print media businesses within the context of social marketing

Social marketing is an approach to creating behavioral change by using commercial marketing techniques to solve social problems for individuals, a target group or the whole community. In social marketing concept, social benefit and long-term community interests takes priority. Social marketing approach is used in many areas such as education, environment, culture and health that is discussed or attract public attention. It is important that the social marketing campaign planned to create a solution to a problem that threatens the health of the society is introduce to the public and announced to the determined target audience in order to raise awareness about the issue. At this stage, print media enterprises one of the media tools have a key position to introduce to the target audience a thought or suggested behavior towards the solution of the identified social problem. The most fundamental reason for addressing this study is to underline the importance of health news in promoting social marketing campaigns that are planned to protect and develop public health. It is aimed to reveal factors such as how the news is reflected in the reader, what kind of language is preferred and the images selected when preparing the news and the effect to be created in the public opinion by Teun A. Van Dijk's Discourse Analysis Method. In this context, health news in the context of social marketing published between January 01, 2015 and December 31, 2015 in Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet and Zaman newspapers, which are determined by random sample method, were examined.