How many new words and phrases have entered your vocabulary since March? Social distancing, mask mandate, virtual learning and now, time to add another phrase to the vocabulary: crowdsourcing. You may ask, “What is this crowdsourcing and why would I need it for the yearbook?” Let me explain. The staff wants to do a spread…
Idea File Magazine
Sure, we’d love every outdoor event to occur during a 70-degree golden hour with a light breeze that fades into a magical sunset, but the reality is that rain happens. And this year in particular, we must take advantage of every opportunity to get sports photos, rain or shine. Just because you feel a few…
With schools beginning in a distance-learning format, we’re forced to reexamine yearbooks. If our yearbooks are going to be memory books, reference books, public relations books and – perhaps most importantly this year – history books, then journalistic, interview-based copy is a crucial component of our 2021 yearbooks. For those who have relied on pictures…
Yearbook staffs took on the challenge of working from home and created some of the most beautiful and innovative yearbooks we’ve seen. Many became so popular that more were printed to meet the demand. I chatted with four advisers about how they finished their books from home, what they learned from the experience and how…
Taking a chronological content approach might be the best way to make sense of this unprecedented year. The sequence of content distribution requires deciding how to organize pages in a way that hooks the reader into the story, keeps their attention with an interesting and logical flow of information and doesn’t block signature submission. Here’s…
Simple techniques for moving your photography from short-term to long-term memory We all have images forever embedded in our long-term memory: a childhood photo, our high school prom, an image from a major historical event (a recent immigration photo of a young father and his daughter lying dead in the Rio Grande or a shot…
Let’s talk about quick reads. First of all, what is a quick read? You may call them another name – sidebar, secondary coverage, mod, even side salad. No matter what they are called, they have an objective; tell a story or give more information about a story in short, digestible bits. Given that the readers…
Every year, the process of creating the yearbook for the next year begins. So much time and effort go into the planning, organizing, collaborating, writing, shooting, designing – the creation – that it’s valuable to step back and discuss just whose book is it you are creating. How you view your audience and the ownership…
When I worked on my first yearbook 10 years ago, one of the many unsolved mysteries was senior ads. I assumed parents would create the ad at home and send it to me with a check in plenty of time for deadline. Boy, was I wrong. Our students procrastinate, and their parents do too. Collecting…
High school journalists covering politics in the era of President Donald Trump face a daunting challenge. A polarized electorate makes it ever more difficult for any reporter to toe the line of objectivity. Scholastic journalists, particularly those working for yearbooks, face an even bigger hill to climb as they face possible pressures from sources, fellow…