Students still trust the trusty hard-copy yearbook

For a high school senior, Ahnika Kroll spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the future — and not just her own.

The 17-year-old is trying to figure out what she and her peers will want to remember about their high school years.

Kroll, a student yearbook staffer at Stillwater Area High School, already is convinced of one thing: Those memories should be contained in a hardcover book.

"People will likely forget what happened in their day-to-day life, but they'll get out their yearbook to remind them how it was," she said.

For decades, the high school yearbook served as a repository of postage-stamp-sized school pictures, posed group photos of the cheerleading squad and mug shots of teachers. But unlike other print products that have seen their influence diminish, yearbooks are holding strong. In fact, changes in technology, approach and attitude have enabled them to document school life in a more dynamic and diverse way.

Laurie Hansen, adviser for the Stillwater yearbook for 25 years, has watched the evolution.

Instead of shooting the expected group photo of the school's National Honor Society, "we covered their blood drive and showed them setting it up and donating," she said. "That tells a better story."

Hansen, who also teaches yearbook workshops, arms her student staffers with digital cameras and assigns them to roam the halls and attend school events, looking for candid moments.

"We don't want to stage pictures — we want to capture moments no one can predict," said Kroll, who covered Ugly Sweater Day, the robotics team and a room-decorating contest between teachers in addition to the school musical.

"One day I had the camera in my chemistry class and I got a super-awesome picture of a guy playing with dry ice in an experiment," she said. "It pops on a page about academics."

Looking beyond the stars

Student staffers are changing not just how they fill their pages, but with whom.

Instead of just paying homage to homecoming queens, quarterbacks and student council presidents, yearbooks now include as many students as possible. Some staffs even use indexing programs that keep track of which students they've captured.

"The yearbook used to be more of a picture book and just the popular people went in," said Hansen. "Now the idea is that everyone should be covered because it's everyone's school. It's more an accurate history book that way."

Bloomington-based Jostens, the nation's largest yearbook publisher, has noted — and promoted — that movement.

As the publisher of yearbooks for 17,000 schools, Jostens provides training and online coaching for yearbook staffs, and tries to build sales among students from families unfamiliar with the tradition.

"Increasingly, we see the effort to engage all students in the school story," said Murad Velani, chief operating officer. "The yearbook can reflect a school's culture and changing landscape. It's a great platform for inclusion."

Depending on the size of the school and the book, a single copy can range from $40 to $110. Despite what can be a hefty pricetag for some students, yearbook sales have remained constant over the past five years, according to a report by IBISWorld.

So far, printed yearbooks have managed to hold their own in the digital onslaught. But not all schools across the country are sticking with print. Some have turned to producing online-only versions.

Still, Kelvin Miller, spokesman for Eden Prairie-based Lifetouch, insists the bound book will never be obsolete.

"The only way that you can guarantee that a book will be readable 100 years from now is to print it," he said. "Who's to say the technology you use to look at a virtual yearbook today won't go the way of the floppy disc? Students and parents understand that and don't want to risk it."

Miller also pointed out that younger students are growing up with yearbooks. Lifetouch publishes high school yearbooks, but also is the nation's top producer of "memory books," the soft-cover yearbook-style books favored by elementary and middle schools.

"This segment of our business is growing by leaps and bounds," he said.

Distilling the best

To stay relevant, some yearbook makers are encouraging students to customize their books. California-based Tree Ring gives students two pages they can upload their own pictures to.

"Every kid has a digital camera in their pocket. If they can add their personal memories, their yearbook becomes more relevant to them," said Aaron Greco, Tree Ring's co-founder. "It's their Facebook mashed up with Shutterfly."

Oddly enough, it might be that our photo-saturated culture is helping yearbooks thrive.

"More photography doesn't equal better photography," said Seth Lewis, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who studies social media. "The yearbook presents a finite number of pictures for people who've always had an infinite stream of them. But students see a strength in that once they're curated in print," he said. "The yearbook distills down to the best of it."

Despite the snappier, slicker look of the yearbook, its mission remains the same: to be a reference book for the school and community that it covers.

Tim Dorway, principal at Chanhassen High School, doesn't see that changing.

"It's a historical record of the student body, told by and about the students. Our yearbook kids feel a real responsibility for that documentation," he said. "Storytelling has changed and this generation is so good at chronicling their experiences. We do online communications of what's going on at school, and the yearbook kids feed the day-to-day piece. But at the end of the year, students still want something to hold."

Kevyn Burger is a freelance writer and newscaster at BringMeTheNews.com.