Yearbooks become irrelevant in the age of Facebook

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Christina Le sat down with a phone book the first week of school and began cold-calling local businesses.As the yearbook business manager at Oxnard High School in Oxnard, Calif., the senior hoped selling ads would keep the yearbook class afloat. "They listened to my spiel," Le said, but it has gotten harder to persuade them to buy.Most of the revenue has instead come from selling about 1,050 of the yearbooks to students. That's a 35 percent purchase rate at the school of 3,000, and so far, it has stayed stable and high enough to keep up with costs.Lagging sales or not, yearbook classes say they must work harder and get more creative each year to keep the long-standing tradition alive. High school yearbooks generally receive no subsidies and must pay their own way.Parents might remember them as an end-of-year staple, but these days, yearbooks jockey for popularity with other student must-haves, like gas, prom tickets, and the latest electronic gadgets.Students have a lot of choices, and some focus more on short-term rewards. In 20 years, it might be fun to drag out a yearbook and reminisce, but a video game might be more exciting right now, said Ted Warfield, a yearbook adviser at Newbury Park High School in Newbury Park, Calif.Nationwide, some schools report yearbook sales have increased recently, but others have flat-lined or dropped, said Rich Stoebe, communications director at Jostens, which supplies yearbooks throughout the country.High schools doing well are finding ways to focus more attention on content, he said, and making sure all students are represented in the finished product."You don't want a yearbook that could be found at any other high school," said Amisha DeYoung, an Oxnard High senior and member of the yearbook class. DeYoung and the rest of the class took an idea from television this year, using the theme "Unwrapped" and giving students an inside view of the school in the yearbook, which was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and plenty of other schools have made changes as well.Changes have been made based on market research, Warfield said. "We don't design a book for a committee of competition people. We make a book for 16- and 17-year-olds."Kids now grow up keeping in touch online, posting photos and messages on Facebook or MySpace pages, and, Warfield said, students identify more with their own "community" of friends rather than the entire school.Even when sales fall, students crowd yearbook classes, advisers said. In class, students learn a lot of things about business and the real world, including how to work with people and perform under deadline pressure.Lots of high schools around the country have experimented with high-tech additions to yearbooks, like DVDs or computer discs of photos. When students want a yearbook, a Web site or disc alone won't do, said Eric Manders, a Newbury Park sophomore. "A yearbook is tangible," he said. "You can hand it to somebody."Equally important to the content, students said, is the teen ritual of signing yearbooks. It can't be duplicated in the digital world, said Le from Oxnard High. Yearbooks are reliable and show people what life was like for decades or longer, she said."Yearbooks really archive what happens in a time span," said Melanie Bryant, the yearbook adviser at Ojai, Calif.'s Nordhoff High School. "I don't think that can be replaced by a DVD or video."Cheri Carlson is a reporter at the Ventura County Star