ATLANTA — Each yearbook will be different and yet the same.
All 370 or so yearbooks will chronicle the past year at Sugar Hill, Ga.’s White Oak Elementary School, its students, its teachers and the high moments of the graduating class of 2012.
And instead of just the usual slate of class photos, Johnny’s copy will include two pages or more of his personal memories, part of a new trend that makes school and college yearbooks more desirable.
“In the past, we had to determine at the beginning of our contract how many books we wanted printed, and then we were on the hook to sell them all in order for it to be cost-effective,” said Kathy Brott, yearbook adviser at White Oak. “Now parents can go online, add personalized pages if they want and place their order. The good thing is we don’t have extra books that we have to pay for but don’t sell.”
As school and family budgets have shrunk over the past decade, and Facebook and other social media have made it easier for students to tell their own stories, traditional yearbooks have struggled to survive. At some schools, yearbooks have vanished. Others have been forced, like newspapers, to remake themselves, and they’re turning to online companies like Lulu, Lifetouch and TreeRing to do it.
Aaron Greco, TreeRing’s CEO, said the California-based company is providing yearbooks for thousand of schools nationwide, including nearly a dozen in metro Atlanta, that might have otherwise eliminated the keepsake altogether.
Using TreeRing, yearbook staffs can collaborate on the publication’s design online and offer students the option of adding customized pages, ordering a printed copy or viewing it online. More than 100,000 students have opted to customize their books, adding everything from career aspirations to special holidays to personal memories and milestones.
“For today’s kids, who with smartphones now have a lot of photos of themselves on Facebook and communicate with their friends online, it modernizes the yearbook,” Greco said. “When we give them the ability to add their own photos and memories, the yearbook becomes a reflection of their own experience, not just an artifact about the most popular or photographed kids at the school.”
Plus, Greco said, parents and students can purchase their yearbook directly from Tree-Ring, eliminating the cost burden on school budgets.
“Schools often ask us how we can afford this model, but we’re not taking any financial risks,” he said. “Our technology allows us to wait until just a few weeks before the end of school and not print a book unless it’s purchased. Because we print on demand, there’s no cost to our schools or to us for unwanted books.”
This is White Oak’s first year using the online service. Brott said the school made the switch from one company to another because the format was too complicated for elementary school students to manipulate.
“It just didn’t fit the needs of our young students,” she said. “We needed something simpler.”
The new yearbook model is just as relevant on college campuses. At Emory University, sophomore Will Ezor helped resurrect its yearbook, The Campus, after a nearly 15-year hiatus, using TreeRing.
The 20-year-old editor-in-chief, who has worked on yearbook staffs since middle school, said, “TreeRing is great because students can make it about them, plus a printed yearbook also provides a sense of permanence that is lost in the era of fleeting web-based content.”
Ezor said he recently held an on-campus sale to introduce the new edition and generate interest to fellow students, who are already beginning to express an interest in an online edition.
Both Ezor and Brott give the finished product rave reviews.
“It came out beautifully,” Ezor said. “The colors are vibrant and the photos are crisp. I’m very happy with it.”
Kate Donovan, Emory’s archivist, said that the demise of traditional school yearbooks began some 12 years ago.
“There are two primary reasons for that,” she said. “Student lives have become more digitized and yearbooks are incredibly expensive, so that makes them less appealing.”
Emory, however, is somewhat of a unique case, Donovan said.
“Students seem to like gathering their college experience in a sort of unified, thematic and permanent way that Facebook and other social media doesn’t quite allow for,” she said. “When students published the online yearbook last year, they did it in part to commemorate the university’s 175th anniversary. I think the students saw themselves and saw their yearbook as part of the legacy of Emory, so it had a lot of meaning for them.”
The last year The Campus was published in any form was in 1999, when the cost to produce the book shot up and student interest dropped. An online version was resurrected last year.
Donovan said that before that, yearbooks thrived, and for many of the same reasons they are now experiencing a comeback.
Traditional yearbooks, she said, were affordable, funded in part through advertisements by local businesses, and included sections commemorating different classes. Students contributed their own personal information and photographs.
“But if you look at the full span of yearbooks, you do see trends emerge,” Donovan said. “Yearbooks, whether digital or in print, capture and preserve campus academic life and scholarship, provide a window into the cultural and political issues of the day, and, of course, paint a vivid picture of school spirit.”
