Whether we have a pleasant or a horrible experience creating a yearbook is not influenced by our quality of layouts or photographs. Most of us can even accept it and carry on if our page software occasionally does not behave. What really makes you despise or love this whole process is how organized you are.
Many reporters have written books. These works of fiction and non-fiction were written by a variety of people who have worked for news organizations. Whether they are worth recommending is for you to discover, as one or two of these books may be a little intense, but it does show how the path of journalism can take writers down different roads.
High school yearbooks and newspapers provide students with real-world training and an opportunity to create and showcase their work. Despite these similarities, viewpoints on the roles for the yearbook and the newspaper are usually vastly different. However, with each passing year, the line of distinction seems to be getting blurry.
It is hard to give up control. Even after three years as a yearbook adviser, I find it hard to know when to step in and when to let the staff make mistakes for the sake of learning from them.
You may be overlooking a vast and multi-talented resource for your yearbook program: parents. Parents love their children, want them to succeed and want to help when they can. If you show them the value of your program, and explain how it works in a way they can support it, your program will benefit.
Without deadlines, chaos would reign in the world of yearbooks. Nothing can be done to get rid of deadlines and the stress they cause. But technology can reduce the amount of time submission takes, providing more time at deadline. More time at deadline means less time being stressed.
Now is the time to head off common complaints heard at distribution.
Not too long after the first heavy boxes are sliced open and the new yearbooks distributed, it begins.
Our yearbook concept is not new. We are following the workshop adage: yearbooks should echo the year, the school, the students. And yet, something is changing.
WHEN I WAS SITTING IN UNDERGRADUATE CLASSES, ONE OF THE KEY POINTERS THAT PROFESSORS GAVE US FUTURE TEACHERS WAS TO APPRECIATE AND RECOGNIZE THE SUPPORT STAFF IN THE SCHOOLS IN WHICH WE WOULD BE WORKING. AS A TEACHER, I HAVE FOUND THIS TO BE GREAT ADVICE, BUT AS A YEARBOOK ADVISER, IT OFFERS EVEN MORE.
Like the old saying “you can’t be too rich,” there is no such thing as being too organized. We all talk about it. But how many of us really take the steps to become organized?