Poynter: Students prefer print college papers to online

In case you didn't see it, Poynter.org has an interesting column today about how students prefer to read their college papers in print than online.

"I talked with several college newspaper advisors (sic) across the country, and they all said their print newspapers are much more popular than their online versions," Bill Krueger wrote in the column. Krueger interviewed advisers and general managers from The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Indiana Daily Student at Indiana University, The Shorthorn at the University of Texas at Arlington, the College Heights Herald at Western Kentucky University, the Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California.

Virtually all of them said that while traffic to their Web sites is going up, print beats online readership, hands down.

In a Spring 2010 study, Student Monitor, a New Jersey college market research company, found that 63 percent of students surveyed classify themselves as frequent or light readers of the print edition of their campus newspaper.

How about your school -- are students more likely to read your news product in print or online? What can college news organizations do to encourage students to read their online products? Or do you think it's kind of quaint that tech-savvy, iPhone-toting, wired-to-the-max students take a few minutes every week to sit down to read a dead tree?

Killing Print Newspapers: My Take

Just to make it clear, I don't endorse Sean Gallagher's provocative idea that college newspapers should shut down their print operations. Print college newspapers serve an important role on campus and I don't think the advertising dollars are adequate online yet to justify killing the paper product in most cases. (Bryan Murley makes some interesting points about this at on his Innovation in College Media site.)

However, I do think Gallagher has some good suggestions for rethinking our student media products and we all should be considering Web-first and Web-only publishing for a lot of different kinds of material.

For those of you who comment about this and other blog posts on the CMA listserv, I'd like to encourage you to post your comments here where they can be seen more widely. (To post a comment, simply hit the comments link below each story.) The listserv is a closed community, which is important for many discussions, but here you can discuss issues in the open not just with other advisers but with student journalists, who really need to be in on these debates.

It's been gratifying to see so much thoughtful discussion about this topic.