Turning the Page on Tradition
Are college yearbooks on the endangered-species list?
Somehow, yearbooks have always been more than the sum of their parts. More than mere highlights of the year's events, those permanently smiling portraits always held—for me, anyway—the iconic poignancy of a frozen dream. But now yearbooks are receding from the cultural mainstream—at least at the college level. Like newspapers, these annual publications are under siege from the Web. Social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace allow users to share instantly the photos that once would not have been published for months, and enable college friends to stay in touch years after dorm life is done.
Rich Stoebe, the director of communications at Minneapolis-based publisher Jostens, says a recent survey by his firm found that more than 1,000 colleges and universities are still publishing annual yearbooks. That means, though, that a similar number of the nation's four-year institutions are not. Even universities that have kept their yearbooks are experiencing declining sales and funding cuts. Hard-bound volumes can cost up to $100, a sum that newly budget-conscious students may be unwilling to cough up.
Some schools are publishing yearbooks on CDs rather than paper. But it's hard to duplicate the thrill of the old-fashioned print version. "There is nothing better than turning the pages of a yearbook to see who signed it and the comments they left," says Joseph Carlis, who sells old yearbooks online. Facebook may provide an adequate substitute if all you want is to be reminded of who was in your class, he says, but it's not going to spark memories of those key moments in any given year. "A yearbook is something you can put up on a shelf for years," muses David Williams, a student adviser at Purdue University, which stopped publishing its Debris yearbook in 2008. "And when you take it down, it's like opening a time capsule." Popping a disk into your hard drive just doesn't have the same allure.
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Arlene Getz is Editorial Director for Newsweek's Worldwide Special Editions. In that capacity, she develops editorial cooperation between Newsweek International and its expanding network of foreign language editions and other joint venture partners around the world. Newsweek currently has eight titles—two in Spanish, one each in Chinese, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. Prior to taking up this post, Getz served as senior editorial manager on the Newsweek Web site, helping to oversee its daily domestic, foreign and political editorial coverage. Getz played a key role in Newsweek.com's transition from an online publication of just a few bite-sized news nuggets a day to its current place as one of the Web's largest newsmagazine sites. Her previous positions include serving as the deputy editor and foreign editor of the site, working to reinvent the international section and expanding the site's non-U.S. news coverage. Her role included commissioning and editing reports from Newsweek's global network of reporters, supervising the Web editorial staff and liaising with Newsweek's corporate partners. She also wrote on political and international news and edited the site's award-winning online sections on the attacks on September 11, 2001; the Iraq war, the U.S. presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 and the 2007 assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Getz first began reporting for Newsweek magazine from South Africa, where she covered the struggle against apartheid, the release of Nelson Mandela and the country's transition to democracy. She has also served as a foreign correspondent for Gemini News Service of London, the St. Petersburg Times of Florida and the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia. Getz has degrees in journalism and law, and was a Visiting Press Fellow at Cambridge University, England. Her honors include Front Page Awards in 2002 and 2003 for her online news coverage of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In addition she has received three awards—including two for online commentary—from the New York Association of Black Journalists and was awarded a Gatekeeper's Fellowship to Lebanon and Syria by the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins. She has also served as a judge for fellowship programs run by the International Reporting Project and the Overseas Press Club of America (OPC) and was elected as a first vice president of the OPC in 2008.
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