LOCAL NEWSPAPER READING HABITS OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: KONYA EXAMPLE

Human beings, in historical course, have always wondered and felt the need to learn what is happening around. the written press, which arised as a result of such a need, has an important place in the formation and transferring of knowledge and convictions. the press, which is differentiated according to content and distribution zones, operates in international, national, regional and local scale. local newspapers, that is the focus of this study, performs the tasks and functions of the press at local level. local newspapers, which are published and distributed in a region, have a functional mission in reflecting the problems and in transposing of demands of the local people. as it should be underlined, local newspapers faced with economic and technical, problems and have difficulty in finding qualifıed personnel trained in journalism. these types problems made it difficult compete with national newspapers and the natural outcome of this has been a continuous decline in the number of local newspaper readers. in what level does the local press, which is struggling to survive because of the many structural problems, attract and followed by, is the the main problematic of this study. this study has been designed to measure the viewpoints of university students on local press in the example of konya. considering the findings of the field research, obtained by applying the survey technique to 373 students studying at the undergraduate level at necmettin necmettin erbakan university, university students seem to follow local press at very low level. one of the important findings of the research is that young people prefer to follow the developments, that is related with the region they live in, on local television channels and internet instead of local newspapers.