The Jeff Beckham Weblog

The Economist reports on the death of college yearbooks:

One fixture of college life is rapidly disappearing. Yearbooks, those beloved annual publications recording the events and people of the academic year, are suffering from plummeting print-runs, or are even being dropped altogether, in colleges across the country.

Predictably, the culprits are cost (as high as $75) and booming social networks, where students and alumni keep up with each other and share photos and videos.

The magazine offers that “yearbooks are hanging on in American high schools”, but from my personal observation, they’re doing better than that. I got a look at my first modern-era high school yearbook a few weeks ago and was struck by the contents. A full two-thirds of it is advertising, the type where parents buy showy full-page ads congratulating their child on their accomplishments. I’m not denigrating that practice — I’m sure I’ll do the same when the time comes — but it shows that some high school yearbooks are not only hanging on, but thriving.

Disclosure: I was co-editor of the Skyline High School yearbook (The Origin) during my senior year in 1987.