Paper Title
Twitter as A News Tool: A Study on the View of the University Students Living in Turkey on Twitter’s News Function

Abstract
Developments in communication technologies are deeply affecting the media world. Every development that has taken place in technology, has changed the function of reporting news of the media during the period. The communication, which was made with the telegraph first, gave its place to the newspapers. The widespread function of news reporting, that began with newspapers, lost its popularity with the invention of the radio. The radio was the world's fastest news channel until the invention of television. Along with the emergence of television, visuality was incorporated into new reporting and reporting changed in dimension. With the development of the Internet, the concept of new media was born. The new media changed the aspect of reporting. First, the concept of internet reporting was developed. Social media, which became widespread with the emergence of web 2.0 technologies later, created radical changes in the media’s news reporting function. Together with social media, news started to be spread as fast as never was before and rapid news reporting became widespread, with both audio and visual items. As a result of the integration of social media with smartphones, the consumers have begun to receive instant news. In this study, a descriptive research was carried out on university students living in Turkey towards their thoughts about the social media platform Twitter's news reporting function. In the first part of the research, a conceptual research on Twitter reporting was conducted and the findings of previous studies about Twitter in Turkey were evaluated. In the second part of the study, a field application was carried out. In this context, a questionnaire was prepared describing the views of young people studying at universities in Istanbul in Turkey to Twitter as news media. In the first part of the questionnaire, the use of social media by university students in obtainment of information was examined. In the second part of the questionnaire, a scale related to social media reporting, which was prepared with reference to Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015, took place and the opinions of university students living in Turkey towards Twitter as a news media were analyzed. As a result of the analyzes made in the SPSS 22.0 program prepared with the quantitative research method, it has emerged that the function of news reporting of Twitter as media in Turkey is increasing day by day. It was underlined that the new generation regard Twitter especially as an important news channel. This shows that social media reporting is growing day by day, and especially puts the traditional media reporting into the shades. The fact that Twitter is the fastest news reporting media in today's world, threatens the news reporting function of traditional media in terms of the future and makes it compulsory for traditional media to converge with social media. Keywords- Social Media, News, Twitter, Functions of Media, News Reporting, Twitter Journalism