By Zach Miners
Facebook could offer a different perspective for those high school memories
Challenged by the amount of time and energy today's teenagers devote to staying up to date on their friends' Facebook or MySpace pages and Twitter feeds, the traditional school yearbook is facing an identity crisis. The extent to which today's students will prefer to share their high school reminiscences via online social networks a few years from now is unclear. At the moment, yearbook staffs are grappling with a culture of Twitter-fueled immediacy and trying to use it to their advantage.
At Whitney High School in Rocklin, Calif., yearbook editors saw an explosion in Facebook's popularity as their chance to reach more students. They created a profile on the site for the school's yearbook, Details, and used it as a forum where students--whether they're on the yearbook staff or not--could submit content such as photos and story ideas. The Details account has more than 600 "friends." And because the profile is registered as a person rather than as a group or fan page, all of the account's updates appear front and center on its friends' news feeds when they log in to Facebook--a feature that helps market the yearbook.
"We wanted to establish a presence so we could remind students of what we're doing and how they could be involved," says Sarah Nichols, a Whitney High journalism teacher who is the yearbook's adviser. "We want to always reinforce that it's theiryearbook."
Representatives from the largest yearbook companies, like Dallas's Taylor Publishing Co. and Minneapolis's Jostens Yearbooks, say that they view social networking websites and yearbooks as different, noncompeting entities. "Social networking is a way of connecting in real time, whereas a yearbook tells the story of a complete year and is a keepsake that lasts for decades," says Richard Stoebe of Jostens.
Out of class.
Students agree. "I like getting a yearbook because it allows you to look back," says Mariah Jones, a senior at First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach, Va. "With Facebook and MySpace, all those photos can be taken down."
The real-time aspect of online social networking has nevertheless challenged yearbook editors to produce better, more inclusive records of what goes on in and around schools. When Whitney students send their friends Facebook "event alerts" about extracurricular clubs and activities, those posts also appear on the yearbook's profile page. Nichols says the digital posts have enabled the yearbook staffers to identify trends and activities they wouldn't otherwise have known about. "Kids don't see their outside life as part of their school life, so they would never even think to tell us," she says. For example, as a result of Facebook, the yearbook staff learned of and covered a long weekend riding trip held by the school's club devoted to longboarding--the term used for skateboarding with boards longer than the usual ones.
Industry executives say that students are more likely to purchase yearbooks if the books provide coverage of the things that they're interested in. "If you ask a kid why they don't buy a yearbook, very often they'll say it's because they're not in it or their friends aren't in it," says Tom Tanton, senior vice president at Herff Jones, one of the country's largest yearbook publishers.
Some argue that a yearbook's popularity depends just as much, if not more, on regional and cultural differences. "We have parts of the country where schools sell yearbooks to 80 to 90 percent of the student body," says Tanton. "But there are other parts of the country that may only sell yearbooks to 30 percent of the student body." The economy is a factor, too, because the cost of a yearbook can range from $25 to $100.
Some students also are trying out options that would fit somewhere between the traditional yearbook and an Internet option such as Facebook or MySpace. At Norwalk High School in Norwalk, Conn., a group of students created a video yearbook just for seniors. But Norwalk High's yearbook advisers say that sales of the video book have been terrible. "We're seeing that a lot of those new things aren't really competing with the old-fashioned yearbook," says Anthony Pagano, an adviser and English teacher.
Dan Segers, also a Norwalk High yearbook adviser and English teacher, says students enjoy seeing themselves in the published book. "On social networking websites, it's you or your friend putting up your picture," Segers says. "But a yearbook is different because somebody else is thinking of them. It gives students a sense of importance."
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