The way of reading news has evolved especially since the advent of the internet. Reading news from printed newspapers has long been abandoned and the majority of the world's population today reads through gadgets. This study examines students from three public universities in Malaysia which are Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM), Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) and Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM) in terms of interest in reading news and methods of reading. The students were randomly selected in this study and the selection universities are also by simple random sampling. Result showing that the majority of students do not read the news very often but if they do, they read it through a gadget. Meanwhile, international students tend to read news about their country of origin when continuing their studies in malaysia.

Many current studies approved that online newspaper is more popular compared to traditional newspaper, and this trend also included university students as one of the increasing readers. Therefore, this paper discusses the uses of online news among university students in Malaysia by specifically looking at their background which is gender, course of study, and the gratifications gained from the reading. Findings suggested that these three criterias must be considered in order to produce better online newspaper in future.