Yearbooks still retain their senior focus.

A yearbook should emphasize the positive and ignore the negative

Coverage methods include stories, photos, captions, sidebars and infographics.

Students want a yearbook to capture only memories of time spent in school.

Balanced coverage – coverage that is representative of all students – is important in a yearbook.

Yearbooks should reflect the students’ point of view, not the faculty or administration viewpoint.

Yearbooks should include more posed photos than candid or action photos.

Interesting academics coverage is important because students are in school to learn.

Personality profiles should be of people that most students can relate to, not just the popular kids or student leaders.

The student life section should cover only school topics.

The academics section should concentrate on students and their opinions rather than on teachers and courses.

Sports sections should cover interscholastic sports and not individual or recreational sports.

Team photos should not dominate a spread.

Club coverage should appeal to non-members as well as to those actively involved.

The people section should contain only student portraits.

Senior portraits must always be much larger than underclassmen portraits.

The best place for faculty and staff portraits is in the people section, not academics.

The ladder is used to identify which and how many pages are assigned to each section.

The ladder provides the overall plan for a yearbook’s coverage.

While it is best to finalize the ladder before the first deadline, staffs must be willing to change it to accommodate significant unplanned events.

When covering beats, staff members establish relationships with people and then wait for the contacts to get back to them with news.

When covering a beat, the reporter should make contact with sources at least once a week.

If beats are well-defined, and the staff is diligent in gathering information, little of what is happening at your school should slip by unnoticed.

It’s good to have a diverse staff that is taking a lot of different classes so the staff knows of good lessons to cover.

You need to know what’s happening on your beat, but your editors don’t need to know.