While working with schools at the Kansas City Elite Weekend this September, Ask Mike host Mike Taylor, CJE, was really impressed by four students. So he interviewed them. These four young women are exceptional leaders, and their conversations with Taylor show how capable student leaders can be. Taylor chats with them about their roles in producing the great writing their …
Everyone always wants to know what the current “trends” are for the upcoming yearbook year. What cool things are other schools doing that we should consider doing? Or even better, what did we do that has become a trend that everyone is going to be doing in 2019? At every workshop and every convention everyone wants to hear this session. …
The websites Humans of New York and StoryCorps are great examples of written and visual storytelling. Use them to teach your students how to get more personal interest stories into this year’s book if there’s time, or to start training next year’s reporters. One of a journalist’s primary jobs is to tell compelling stories. Telling great stories starts with trust …
Below is list of common excuses you might hear from yearbook reporters, after they’ve had a bad interview and they return with bad information. Fortunately, good interviewing skills can be taught to help counter each of these excuses and help every student on yearbook staff – even the shy, quiet ones – become more confident interviewers.
There are lots of ways to be informative. Pie charts, bar graphs, quotes, polls, and lists are all ways to convey information. The key is to use them to impart information that is important to the students. A bar graph for a survey question on whether students were happy the football team won the homecoming game does not make for compelling reading.
Strong theme copy helps introduce your unifying concept to your readers. Learn some tips and tricks for creating the optimal copy.
Earlier this month, popular ABC sitcom “The Goldbergs” featured the yearbook prominently. The show, which is set in the 1980s and follows the funny stories of a Philadelphia-area family, talked about the yearbook during the May 10 episode, “Jedi Master Adam Skywalker.” Adam, the youngest Goldberg, works on his school’s yearbook staff. His older siblings, Barry and Erica, wonder what …
A writing assignment for an AP Literature class turned into a heartfelt essay about the meaning of yearbook. Emily Fogleman spent three years on the yearbook staff at Southern Alamance High School in Graham, North Carolina, serving as editor-in-chief in 2016, her senior year. Last spring, her AP Literature class was assigned to write an essay in the style of …
Coming up with an interesting angle for a yearbook story can often be a challenge. Either the angle is too vague, or too specific, and it’s nearly impossible to cover the story. Finding an angle that’s just right will help with writing the story later on. But many writers find themselves stumped when it comes to finding the right story …
Your yearbook’s colophon, typically appearing near the back of the book, provides the reader with some important information. The colophon indicates how your yearbook was produced and includes the name of your printing company, the number of copies, type of paper the book was printed on, cover specs, the software your staff used to produce the book and other technical …