The Guardian has decided to take its trial tabloid newspaper for students nationwide.
The Guardian Student will be a free weekly with a circulation of 75,000 going out to 50 university campuses across the UK.
It will come out on a Thursday as a 32-page full-colour tabloid, including news, columns, TV listings, sport and features taken from the main paper.
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There will be a small amount of advertising, but the main aim of the paper is to market The Guardian to students.
Guardian managing editor Chris Elliott said: “It’s about encouraging people in the long run to want to buy the paper. Everyone is looking for younger readers and competition has never been as fierce.
“We think this is one way of getting The Guardian and its tone across to more young people. Any newspaper person working in marketing or circulation will say you can get young people as students with promotions, but it’s quite difficult to retain people all the way through university into adulthood when they get jobs.
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“Each generation has more and more avenues for getting their news.
We’ve got to work pretty hard from very early on to try to encourage them to like the feel of a newspaper, get a sense of its value and build up a habit.”
A six-week trial of Guardian Student began in five university campuses in May with a distribution of 10,000. A full-time editor and two subs are being recruited.
According to The Guardian, it has a higher proportion of student readers than any other national.
By Dominic Ponsford
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