The biggest media story of the day? Magazines are trying to attract subscribers via the Web. No, the mags aren't looking to create whole new interactive, frequently updated Websites, because that would be way too in line with what readers are looking for. Instead, they are sending the entire magazine via email to college kids in hopes that one or two will subscribe to the online edition.

Five schools (literally, individual schools within universities) are participating in the initiative to bring mags to their email inboxes: The School of Cinema-Television at the USC will get Premiere; the Parsons School of Design will get Elle; Johns Hopkins' School for Advanced International Studies will be sent Foreign Policy; the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, BusinessWeek; and Notre Dame’s college of engineering, Popular Mechanics.

So why the push for college kids to have easy digital access to mags? Simple, college students don't normally subscribe to pubs.

“Colleges have typically been a black hole for magazines in terms of distribution,” Jack Kliger, the president and chief executive of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., said. “There’s always been a difficulty in reaching college students because the physical distribution issues are very unique to colleges in that nobody stays in one place for very long.”

Though we have to wonder if those college students don't make up a big chunk of newsstand sales? Especially in New York, where you can't go anywhere without something to flip through … maybe that's why NYU, Columbia, and SVA didn't get any free mags in their inboxes?

Which is honestly fine. It's pretty hard to collage your walls with printouts from your computer.

Magazines Going to the Web to Get Students to Read [Julie Bosman, New York Times]