Case Study of Tertiary Students News Taking Preference: Social Media or Online Newspaper

In this study preferences, trend and usage of social media and online media for news taking from local and international students’ perspective is examined. This study aims to find the most preferred way of news taking by local and foreign students. Twos concepts of online media and social media are the keywords of this study. In general, the integrated of community-based input, content-sharing, interaction and collaboration are called online communication or social media and on the other hand online media are the media that work as an online available machine for presenting different contents. This study is a comparison study using nonrandom sampling method. 200 students are surveyed among 5000 students living in different dormitories. Half of the sample was Turkish language and the other half was not Turkish language and among each language category half of the students were male and the other half were female. Since this research is a quantitative research, SPSS software is applied for analysis of the data. Findings of this study are already supported by secondary data such as different literatures and studies. However, the main questions of this study are answered after results were interpreted. The results of study showed that there is no significant effect of online news media on social media. Results of findings in this study showed that there is significant difference between Turkish and other languages, the results indicated that students with Turkish languages prefer to use online media to track news more than students with other languages. Related to effect of language on social media, the findings of current study did not support the hypothesis and results showed that there is no significant difference between languages in social media. It is recommended to further study to focus on a special type of social media such as social news media, to compare it with other types of media. It is also suggested to the further researcher to investigate effects of social media on improving productivity of students in university which will be an interesting topic. Keywords: social media, online media, news taking, mother language, students.