• by Erik Sass , June 4, 2008

It's a sweet spot for advertisers--and it's reachable in traditional media.

While the print editions of big metro dailies are losing young readers to the Web, college newspapers are still going strong, according to a study conducted by MORI Research for Alloy Media + Marketing. Furthermore, college students look at and recall the ads they have seen. MORI conducted an online survey of 1,200 college students from 550 schools in all 50 states in April.

Overall, 92% of the college students surveyed said they had read the daily edition of their college newspaper at least once during the previous month, and 55% reported reading it every week. Some 30% say they read every issue. For comparison, just under 20% said they had looked at the newspaper's Web site in the last month.

In terms of advertising, 73% of all students surveyed reported reading the campus advertisements, and of this group, 80% said they took some action prompted by seeing an ad. (That's about 60% of all students surveyed).

Seventy-eight percent recalled using coupons or promotional codes from the newspaper, with this figure skewing heavily toward female readers. Popular categories for coupon redemption included food and restaurants, clothing, and big-box retailers.