
Increase Your Yearbook’s Face Value

Jason Kaiser
Jason has worked on a wide variety of print, digital and social initiatives bringing content to life through Yearbook Love, the Digital Classroom and more. A former yearbook adviser, Kaiser has worked with scholastic journalism for more than eight years.
When opening the yearbook for the first time, many students and faculty turn to those precious index pages, scan down and find their name. It’s habitual; we want to see which pages we appear on other than our portrait page. Think how much of a let down it is when you have one or two numbers next to your name. This happened to me — not because I wasn’t involved but rather due to our yearbook staff not ensuring each student was covered.
At Jostens, we believe coverage matters. We talk about three-times coverage because that’s the sweet-spot number that we encourage our schools to reach for inclusivity. Obviously more is more, but having a student appear three-times in the book at minimum is a good place to start for each yearbook staff.
Getting Started with 3-Times Coverage
To get started, you need to get organized. With the Coverage Report, you’re able to take a quick glance at coverage in the yearbook — but you can easily take this a step further. Make a printout biweekly and post in the classroom. Then, bring the team together to think about your ladder. Who are the students that are likely to appear in these sections? If you have team photos already, you can probably make a good guess as to where some of these students might appear. This way you can focus on the students not included in these activities.
Each week, then, have your students going out, getting photos, quotes, opinions, facts from students that have a lack of coverage in your yearbook. This is just one example of many of how to get more coverage of your student body. No matter the method you take, just pay particular attention to your list each week so you can adjust as needed.
Designs Where Coverage Rocks
Let’s take a look at some designs where coverage took the driver’s seat:



Have Ideas About Inclusive Coverage?
We’re always looking for more ideas about how staffs are thinking about coverage in their yearbook spreads. Share your spreads and ideas with us on social media so your ideas can help other staffs increase their yearbook’s overall coverage.