The Death of Yearbook

Here is an interesting article on the economist. The article discusses how yearbooks are disappearing at various colleges around the country.

"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 problem sited in the article are cost of publication and shrinking disposable funds students have left after paying tuition and paying for books. However, the story has one more explanation for the disappearance of the yearbook.

"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. "