Is now the time for getting those 18 to 24's back into newspaper reading?!

This week in lecture, I suffered an embarrassing moment when I was asked to make a list of things that I thought were “good” and “bad” about the past week of Missourians. I read the Missourian here and there, but frankly find it hard to motivate myself to pick it up everyday. Most of the time when I do pick it up everyday and attempt to read the whole thing is when I am working at the Missourian and my grade is dependent on knowing what is going on in Columbia.
What is my point? I guess I just feel like the Missourian is not an “essential” publication for students at the University of Missouri who are not J-School folk, or at least they don’t think it is. I am not being critical for the sake of criticism, but I don’t feel like many people find it necessary to read the paper that are among the ages of 18-24 and who are likely at Mizzou.
No, this isn’t a big life-changing statement or industry-saving announcement and probably isn’t news to anyone who practices journalism. It is no secret that readership among college aged students isn’t very high and I don’t talk to many students outside the J-school who could make an argument against that point.
So, I just wonder if being at one of the world’s most prestigious J-schools with a ready test group of students at MU doesn’t require us to make some more drastic steps to figure out how to draw this age group in to reading the paper. Once again, I am aware that many within the J-School are performing surveys and studies and writing essays that try to explain and solve this problem, but doesn’t the Missourian provide these researchers with an amazing tool?
If one research group found out that this college-aged group got a certain percentage of news online versus from the paper, the website at the Missourian would allow us to experiment with where we place what news. Not many 18 to 24-year-olds at MU have kids in Columbia’s Public Schools, so maybe a story about tuition going up or a hot band coming to Jesse Hall would be a better thing to run higher up on the website than the new High School location. This is just an example, and one that is unfounded in research, but it is simply to help me try and make my point.
With all the changes we are making at the Missourian right now, wouldn’t this be a great time to try out any ideas that might be geared toward making our paper as essential to college students outside the J-School as well as the ones inside it? I am not claiming to be an expert on how to do it, but it just seems that with so many changes going on, now might be the time to at least think about how to change the paper/website to bring that group back into the fold.