Has your yearbook staff ever considered organizing a photo contest? If not, it could be time to give the idea a try.
A photo contest is a great way to get students interested in, and actively involved with, the yearbook by submitting photos for consideration to be used in the book. A contest can even be structured so that the winner gets a free yearbook.
If you haven’t yet done so, you should head over to the Idea File area and read our feature article on QR codes. They’re becoming a popular trend with yearbooks, and a ton of staffs are gonna be putting them in the book this year.
Several staffs experimented with putting QRC’s in the yearbook last year, and they’re now seeing the results.
Adviser Aaron Manfull recently wrote a post over at the JEA Digital Media blog, discussing his idea for creating a new “writing czar” position with his publications staffs this year.
Manfull advises yearbook, newspaper, web and broadcast and was finding a potential need for a new position to serve as a guru that oversees all that copy and serve as a bit of a writing coach.
How familiar are you with the location-based mobile service Foursquare? You might not realize that you can use it with yearbook, but you can.
Walsworth yearbook reps Whitney Moore and Kat Phillips are both nuts about Foursquare and they wrote about using Foursquare in the yearbook room on their blog last week.
Facebook Groups have become extremely popular, as a great way for a small circle of friends or co-workers to communicate in a private way.
Jonathan Rogers at the JEA Digital Media blog wrote about creating a Facebook Group for a publications staff, and how it can be a great way to discuss story ideas, assignments and other business. He even includes some helps tips for creating a Group.
Work with printed publications long enough and you know mistakes happen. The usual ones are typos and misspelled words. But sometimes it is a misidentified student in a caption or students left out of the book.
Some yearbooks put a disclaimer in the colophon reminding readers that the book is a student creation. Just like the rest of the colophon explains how the book was created with specific computers and cameras, the disclaimer adds that throughout the long process, which is done by students, mistakes can be made.
Summer is drawing to a close for a lot of schools in the next week or two, and many yearbook staffs will be headed back to class. That means the real nuts and bolts work of the yearbook, and the covering of events, is about to begin (if it hasn’t already).
Take a look at this article over in the Idea File about making sure you start the year off right with the proper plan, using the ladder to get your yearbook organized.
