As the coordinator for student media advising at North Carolina State University, Bradley advises the daily newspaper, the radio station, a weekly newspaper, a literary magazine, an online magazine and the yearbook. He is a frequent speaker at workshops worldwide on topics ranging from the ethics of digital photography to publications design. He is the editor of the publications for the national Journalism Education Association and active in local and regional associations to improve the quality of journalism education. He has received the Pioneer Award from the National Scholastic Press Association, the Medal of Merit from the Journalism Education Association, the Star of Texas from the Association of Texas Photography Instructors and the Trailblazer Award from the Texas Association of Journalism Educators. In 2006, JEA awarded Wilson its highest honor, the Carl Towley Award.

By Bradley Wilson
Coordinator, Student Media Advising
North Carolina State University
bradleywilson08@gmail.com

If you haven’t noticed, newspapers are undergoing some rough financial times. When Daily Show reporter Jason Jones asked New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller “What is black and white and red all over?” the only possible response was, “Your balance sheet.” If the layoffs at most regional and national publications are any indication, this trend of financial instability is going to continue for a while as quality of the final product suffers.

But college yearbooks haven’t had this problem. Yearbooks have been in trouble a lot longer than newspapers thanks largely to the free services available on the World Wide Web and the ADD generation that sees a shiny object on Facebook or Twitter and won’t sit still long enough to engage in the in-depth reporting and visual appeal of the top college yearbooks. As an article in the Economist in June of 2008 said, “[T]he 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.”

So when our University librarian found some money to digitize “all” of our yearbooks (108 years worth), he was excited. He saw these books, the final draft of history and certainly the most accessible, as a great research tool for historians. He saw it as an opportunity to make this information available to everyone — for free.

Given what newspapers have learned, I wasn’t so excited.
We’ve been selling pages of our yearbook online for several years. We don’t generate a lot of income using the Digital Data Online service, but it’s a quality service and makes the pages available to anyone who might like to purchase them even for books that are now rare and long out-of-print. And it shows that the book has value, lasting value.

While it’s hard to argue that the material in the book wouldn’t be valuable to researchers, students, prospective students and parents, it’s also hard to argue that it should be given away free. After all, the library pays (dearly) to subscribe to journals and only offers restricted access to them online. After all, the students paid for the books through student fees and sales and should see some return on that investment. Why should non-subscribers get the content for free?

Indeed, this material has value. When Johnny Edwards decided to run for high office, it wasn’t long before CNN and most wire services and major newspapers were trying to locate his college mug shot as an undergraduate in the College of Textiles. (We scanned it and e-mailed it all over the world.) When an NCSU student was allegedly involved in a terrorist attack overseas a few years ago, media outlets all over the world wanted to get a copy of his yearbook portrait. (He didn’t have one made.) When photographer Chris Hondros, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, came back to campus, one of the things he enjoyed doing was looking at the images he shot for the yearbook. Seeing them packaged with other images of campus helped to paint a picture of what life was like on campus at the time. Flipping through those tangible pages had value.

But college yearbooks are not the only one facing this challenge with free content on the Web.

A Connecticut school, according to an e-mail I received recently, “has decided to part ways with the traditional yearbook.” Moving instead to a DVD format, the school will have no print edition. Inevitably, the students will use Facebook, a Web site and other social networking tools to provide free photos and content for all the students. Now, in five years when the DVD format has moved from High-Definition to Blu-Ray to something new and DVDs can no longer be read (on any machine except a Macintosh, it seems), who knows how students will get their content. And when Facebook content disappears over the years and Web sites get absorbed in the never-ending push for content on the Web, who knows how students will find photos of their best friends.

I agree with the Economist writer. “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.”

This is certainly not to say that media like the yearbook should not use electronic media to supplement their print product. Posting sample pages, advertising, the progressing index after each deadline and audio-visual shows online can do nothing but increase attention given to the books. They can do nothing but supplement the book. A Facebook fan page and an online advertisement with campus newspaper both serve to draw attention to the book and forge partnerships between college media. Indeed, colleges that provide a podcast of the daily news can package these podcasts on a CD with the yearbook, as a supplement to the book.

If college newspapers, like professional newspapers, provide the first draft of history, then college yearbooks provide the final draft of history. And that is worth something.