Yearbook staffs can capture reader interest with stories that reflect students’ lives today. Feature stories should reflect student interests, concerns and lifestyles.
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Coverage
Shopping malls are great places to get ideas for designs, fonts, headlines, subheads, folios, and even stories. Trips to two malls with two yearbook advisers and staff members yielded plenty of ideas for yearbooks. The ideas can be found in the Spring 2004 issue of Idea File, Volume 14, Issue 3. However, there were too many good ideas to fit in the printed issue. Here are additional images from the two trips with ideas that you may find useful.
At the beginning of the school year, have all staff members work together to generate a list of all the clubs, groups, sports and organizations within your school. Then, generate a corresponding list if one or two people within each group that would be key contact people in regards to activities, events and updates of their happenings. These people become BEAT CONTACTS.
Yearbooks are made up of 16-page signatures, always beginning with a right-hand page and ending with a left-hand page. In the printing process, a signature is a large sheet of paper on which eight pages (a flat) are printed on each side. After both sides have been printed, the sheet is folded and cut so the pages are in book form.
It’s a fact of life – students die. So do teachers. It is an emotional time for any school. But for publication staffs, emotions cannot rule your decisions. Your staff needs a clear policy so that all school deaths are handled equally, avoiding questions of favoritism.
Yearbook staffs view the index like the mom with four children contemplates her youngest child’s baby book. Ideas for what to put in it are few, and time is limited. Because yearbook staffs wait until the last deadline to think about the index, the section is often only a boring gray list that students open simply to find their own names. But the index can be a section in itself, an archive with sidebars, group shots and group coverage. Assign a staff member to the index and let them use one of these five simple ideas to give it a little flair.
Advisers can take heart. Yearbook staffs are full of teens creating a publication for teens. They usually will know what is trendy and cool and what is not. Trust them, but give them some direction. That is the recommendation of a few yearbook advisers whose yearbooks, or who themselves, have recently won national awards.
Yearbook coverage is generally defined as the happenings at one school during one year. But what is a school? Sometimes a high school is one school with grades on separate campuses, or one school includes preschool through seniors in one or many buildings.
Students are online all the time – in online communities such as MySpace and Facebook, emailing or chatting, and sharing images and videos from camera phones. Now, ClassScene by Walsworth allows students to do those activities within the safety of their school-sponsored ClassScene website.
Sandy Masson has counted before, and the last time she checked, there were 37 languages represented among the students at her school – Grace King High School in Metairie, La.
As the yearbook adviser at Grace King, that puts Masson in an enviable position. Her school is a melting pot, and the yearbook staff is typically a reflection of that – a mixture of kids who are male, female, Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Indian and many other ethnicities. Masson’s diverse journalism room reflects well on the coverage in the school’s yearbook.
