week 3 assignment 1

The death of yearbooks

 From The Economist print edition

A tradition in decline

 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.

The phenomenon is due in part to the price of the hard-bound volumes, typically as high as $75. For cash-strapped students facing ever-rising tuition and living costs they are a luxury that many can’t afford. But the main cause is not the cost so much as the replacement of print with electronic media by and for the Facebook and MySpace generation. With social networks linking hundreds of friends and offering digital photographs and videos the traditional yearbook looks like a bit of a dinosaur.

After more than a hundred years of publication Purdue University, in Indiana, has published its last yearbook, as has nearby DePauw University. Even where colleges have tried to adapt to the new media by, for instance, including DVDs summing up the year along with the print version, yearbooks are attracting few students, readers or editors.

McKendree University is the oldest college in Illinois. Inside its historic buildings, some dating back to the 1820s, its 1,500 students use the latest technology. Although the university still publishes a yearbook, the print-run is a mere 150 copies, only half of which are bought by students. Being on the staff of the yearbook used to be considered prestigious: now only eight students show up for the job. The downturn in print publications has also hit magazines for alumni. These, for instance at McKendree, are increasingly being replaced by online editions.

Yearbooks are hanging on in American high schools but the future is unclear. Parents and students complain about the high prices, and a generation that has never known a time before the internet is losing interest.

Although today’s students find yearbooks old-fashioned, they may one day miss their vanished youth. Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.