Campus Daily Guide and student newspapers

Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media has posted a few pieces on the launch of Campus Daily Guide by mtvU, the same company that hosts many college newspapers on their College Media Network/College Publisher system. Inside Higher Ed did a write up too, that is fairly definitive.

I've responded to a few of the points that Murley made in comments on his blog, but I thought I'd do a longer take.

Let's look at who the Campus Daily Guide's will really compete with. CDG has local event listings, upcoming performers and sporting events, movie times, a local restaurant directory and links to things like an academic calendar and Rate My Professors.

Where do college students go to find these things now?

Very, very, few will turn to their campus newspaper website, because with the possible exception of the restaurant directory, none of these things are provided on a campus newspapers website.

Where do we go for these things?

Facebook
Upcoming.org
Yelp
Live Nation
OpenTable.com
outside

(these are true for me at least, leave where you go in the comments)

Last I checked, none of these places have links to content on college newspapers websites the way Campus Daily Guide does.

So we should all be hoping that the Campus Daily Guides take off. It'll drive at least that much more student traffic to college paper sites that desperately need it.