Product research for college magazines

After evaluating other college magazines, I have found the following conventions that most other college magazines follow:

They have articles that students will actually want to read. They don't have anything that is irrelevant to college life, college work or college itself. Some people's magazines that I have seen have added gossip sections and style sections and I don't think that this is at all relevant to a college magazine. College magazines tend to be educational but not explicitly so. They do it in a way that will make students want to read without really knowing that they are being educated, they create catchy headlines and slogans to draw them in.

They have relevant images. They show pictures that are to do with the college (campus pictures, classroom pictures, sports pictures, college trip pictures) and a lot of students would want to know whether their picture had been featured in the magazine so this would also make them want to read the magazine.

They are free. No students are going to pay for a 10 page college magazine that they're not really interested in. If you give them a free magazine, and they 'have nothing to do', they will read it and see if there is anything interesting/anything that they are interested in, in it. They would definitely not pay for the magazine since they probably wont read it again after they have read it the first time. This is where college magazines differ from music magazines. People will want to read them over and over again and since college magazines are educational, people aren't going to be interested enough to pay.

All of the conventions that are followed are all to get people reading the magazines. Since most are free, they have to get numbers of people reading the magazines to get the funding that is needed to print them.