Many of the nation’s estimated 1,600 college newspapers are now experimenting with editorial and business innovations in the face of some of the same economic hardships that have hit the rest of the newspaper industry.

There is little hard data on the student newspaper field compared to that of the widely-studied commercial side, but these publications also struggle with issues ranging from the balance between print and digital to diminishing advertising revenue.

Like the beleaguered commercial newspaper industry which has tried a wide range of strategies to counter the long slide in revenue and readership, college newspapers also are coming up with new ways of addressing them:

The role of digital in the overall future of the nation’s college newspapers, however, remains an open question. A 2008 survey by Robert Bergland and David Hon of a random sample of 392 college newspapers revealed that over one third (36%) of them either did not have a website or that it was out of date. The results of a follow-up survey conducted in 2012 by Bergland, Hon and Rachele Kanigel and using the same list of college newspapers, revealed that almost the same percentage of papers (37%) still did not have a website four years later.

Note: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that the Commonwealth Times is the student paper of the University of Virginia. It is the student newspaper of the Virginia Commonwealth University.