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2006 WAS NOT A GOOD MONTH for Michelle Putman. The then-editor of the Cactus yearbook was just over a month away from completing the 113th edition when it came to her attention that sales were down several hundred books from the same time last year. Panic ensued.

In a frenzied meeting with senior staff, it was resolved to launch an aggressive marketing effort. T-shirts were ordered and a table was set up on the West Mall to boost sales.

Legions of yearbook staffers took to the sidewalks hoping to “get the word out” on the Cactus. But it was too little, too late. The 2006 Cactus sold the fewest copies of any edition in decades — barely more than 2,000.

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The Cactus’ contract with Walsworth Publishing ends with the 2007 edition, and after two years in the red, Walsworth is disinclined to renew. Unless the yearbook sells 3,000 copies of the ’07 edition, it will relinquish its title as the oldest publication on campus. Why? Because it will cease to exist. In fact, if you think of a yearbook as a collection of thousands of stamp-sized portraits of your classmates, the Cactus yearbook you remember is already gone.

When Kathy Lawrence arrived at The University of Texas in 1994 to direct Texas Student Publications, she inherited a withering Cactus. During the previous 12

years, sales had fallen by nearly 10,000 books, from the all-time high of 14,083 in 1982 to 4,403 in 1994. It was a steady slide: a few hundred every year. Aside from the occasional pause, that slide has continued to the present, bringing the Cactus to its current, critical state. It’s up to this year’s editor, JoAnna Chin, and her staff to figure out why the Cactus is dying and what, if anything, can be done to save it.

What the Problem Is Not

The purpose of the Cactus, says Lawrence, is to document in photos and articles the rich history that comprises a year at The University of Texas. For Chin and her staff, though, capturing that richness presents a logistical nightmare. Consider for a moment just how much stuff there is to cover. With so many people doing so many things in so many different places at any given moment, it can seem, frankly, hopeless. And at first glance it would also seem reasonable to believe that the yearbook’s woes can largely be attributed to the project’s massive scope.

Yet there appears to be no relationship between campus size and sales. In 1982, when the Cactus sold the most copies ever, 48,145 students roamed the campus — roughly as many as matriculate today. So, too, are students now spared the grueling hike across campus to pick up a book that weighs roughly the same as a bobcat. In 2005, apparently enough students came panting into the office that the staff realized that mailing the book to anyone who bought it would eliminate a considerable deterrent for potential buyers. Gone now are the days when so many students neglected to retrieve their books that stacks of unclaimed yearbooks began to build up all over the office. Yet even with postal workers now lugging the books to students’ mailboxes, the net effect appears to be not that more people are now buying the book but merely that all those who buy it now get it.

It would also seem reasonable to believe that the number of portraits taken and the Cactus’ sales numbers are related. In fact, a glance at the last 20 or so years shows

Discussed: Why the Cactus You Knew Is Already Gone ★ Googling for Memories ★ The Cachet of the Cactus Past ★ Cactus as Coffee-table Book ★ Visiting Facebook.com Five Times a Day ★ Cactus as Scrapbook

... ?

GROUP PHOTO: At left, 113 years’ worth of Cactus yearbooks, from 1894 through 2006.

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JOHN FOXWORTH/DAILY TEXAN

JoAnna Chin is the 2007 editor of the Cactus.

the two lines streaking downhill on almost exactly the same slope. That is, until this past year, when the Cactus switched photographers from one based in New York to Austin-based TOPS. With the lovable TOPS owner and photographer Arnie Levine (known to students as just “Arnie”) hailing from just down 23rd Street, he could be at every freshman orientation with a booth (and a throng of beautiful girls he’d enlist) getting the fish to pose for pictures. The number of portraits went from 200 to 2,000 — a disproportionate amount of whom, surprise, surprise, were men. Plus, when students inevitably missed their scheduled appointment to have their pictures taken, they didn’t have to buy a plane ticket to New York to get into the yearbook. They just had to waltz over to TOPS’ West Campus studio and smile. The 10fold increase in portraits, though, had no effect on sales.

One could not be faulted for suspecting that perhaps students simply don’t buy yearbooks anymore. While to a large 42 Th e A l c a l d e S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 0 6

extent that’s true on college campuses, high school yearbook sales have more or less stayed the same for the past several decades. According to Jeanne Acton, assistant academic director of journalism for the University Interscholastic League, high school yearbook sales depend mostly on the socioeconomics of a school district. In the suburbs, sales are as good as ever; in the inner city, not so good, but still nothing worse than usual.

What Might Be the Problem

Perhaps one problem that college yearbooks face is that because students do buy yearbooks in high school, they come to view yearbooks in general as primarily high school artifacts. But the more fundamental difference between high schools and colleges is that in high school you identify with your class. (Remember your old class T-shirts bearing slogans like “Stayin’ Alive, Class of ’85” or “Seniors 2001: A Space

Brian Vanicek was the 1983 editor of the Cactus.

‘Students drop $150 on a textbook like it’s nothing, but they won’t pay half that for a yearbook?’

Odyssey”?) Not so in college. At any given commencement ceremony, the “graduating class” has students who were enrolled for any number of semesters. Plus, with two commencement ceremonies each calendar year, the students who graduate in May are only nominally in the same “graduating class” as the December grads. Still, weak class identity is nothing new on college campuses. It surely existed in the early ’80s when yearbooks were selling like mad.

Weak marketing might also be to blame. It can come as a shock to some college yearbook staffers who never had to market their high school yearbooks that in college, not only do they have to produce the book, they have to convince people to buy it as well. Both Putman and Chin cite their marketing responsibilities as a distracting burden that, in an ideal world, a yearbook editor shouldn’t have to worry about.

Unfortunately for modern college yearbook editors, marketing is the burden they must most concern themselves with if their books are to be read by anyone other than the writers.

Though the April 2006 marketing blitz was almost surely too late in coming for it to have a significant effect on sales, Putman fervently defends her team’s sales efforts. They got more people into the book than the year before — about 10,000 students total. The staff e-mailed all of those students to tell them they were in the yearbook. Then they mailed letters to those students’ parents telling them their kid was in the book. Then they bought an eight-page spread in the Daily Texan as a way of offering students a preview of the book. “No one can say we haven’t tried,” she says. “I did everything in my power.”

Chin hopes to bring new life and new focus to the marketing effort. The Cactus, she says, “is not in your face enough.”

She wants to start marketing sooner. To help her, she’s enlisted a panel of students — one from each college — to serve on an advisory board for the Cactus sales team. These reps will make it their business to see that Cactus writers and photographers attend every noteworthy event their college hosts over the course of the year. “Complete coverage” is the idea, via a horde of informants.

Yet it’s unclear exactly what this marketing board has to do with marketing. Though it will surely expand and improve the book’s campus coverage, it does not address any major complaint of non-buyers. Few people question the book’s editorial quality, and will more shots of deans and professors at college events send students flocking into the yearbook office? From a sales perspective, that’s just offering consumers more of the same. What seems to be the most daunting (and as yet unaddressed) challenge facing the Cactus is how it plans to shake off its 113-year image and sell a redesigned book without having an actual copy to show.

Theoretically, at least, the 2007 yearbook could arrive on campus in September 2007 to great hype and generate enormous interest, but by then the Cactus’ fate will have already been decided.

College yearbooks are also really expensive. For the Cactus, overhead kills. “You know, it’s funny,” Lawrence says, “It costs like $50,000 to produce one yearbook because you’ve got all this back end that has to go into it. But then incre44 Th e A l c a l d e S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 0 6

mentally, the more you print, the lower the unit cost is.” The Cactus’ paltry sales shave the profit margin ever thinner and drive the price of the book ever higher. The 2007 book will cost $75, up from $65 in 2006. Chin, though, doubts that money is the issue. She asks: “Students drop $150 on a textbook like it’s nothing, but they won’t pay half that for a yearbook?” Of course, with textbooks, they have no choice.

The most common complaint that both Lawrence and Chin hear from uninterested students is that yearbooks are not personal enough — that students don’t relate to them.

Either they aren’t in the book, they don’t know anyone in the book, or both. So why would they buy it? Editors have for years been trying to “personalize” yearbooks by offering group shots for free to any student and allowing students some control over the yearbook’s contents. Yet as the Cactus staff saw with the jump in portraits last year, merely adding pictures of more people won’t turn the tide. It’s no mystery why it feels less personal when students heave open the 500page Cactus and find unfamiliar faces staring back at them. In general, students who participate in taking group photos are largely the same students who buy the yearbook anyway. It just doesn’t seem to matter enough to the rest of the students to inspire them to put more effort into a product they’re not interested in buying in the first place.

What Everyone Pretty Much Agrees Are Problems

It’s hard to deny that the Cactus suffers from a buzz problem. In 1983, the Cactus was so anchored into the epicenter of campus that it formed its own social organization, Theta Sigma Pi (alluding to Texas Student Publications), that rented-out downtown clubs to throw parties. The Cactus elité would even charter limos and sip champagne as they rode to their parties. When asked why he thought the modern Cactus was struggling, 1983 editor Brian Vanicek, BJ ’83, Life Member, noted his staff’s esprit de corps and wondered, “I don’t know what the attitude is about the yearbook anymore.

Is it still cool?”

Today, an astounding portion of the student body squints when you ask them about the Cactus. The what? There’s a UT yearbook? Fewer copies sold means less awareness means even fewer copies sold the next year. With every year that sales go down, it gets harder and harder to bounce back. In fact, in the last two-and-a-half decades, once sales fall, they have almost never climbed back. Think of the difference in buzz between one out of every four people buying the book and one out of every 25. That makes for a lot more squinting.

Despite the continued success of high school yearbooks, college yearbooks as you know them appear to be a dead concept. All around the country, college yearbooks are dying, and even the best college yearbooks find themselves clawing just to stay even. The Kansas State Royal Purple is widely regarded as one of the top college yearbooks in the country.

Few college yearbook programs in the nation can boast of as many Gold and Silver Crowns, the prestigious national yearbook awards given by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. Yet in 2006, the Royal Purple sold a mere 4,000

copies to the 23,000 students at K-State, down from its all-time high of 16,000 in the ’80s. Despite enormous marketing efforts in recent years, its sales have more or less stayed flat.

The Royal Purple’s advisor, Linda Puntney, also the executive director of the National Journalism Education Association, wrote her master’s thesis, “An Analysis of the College Yearbook: Its historic Role and Contemporary Status,” on the fall and resurgence of college yearbooks in the late ’70s and early ’80s. She says college yearbooks now face an interesting dilemma: how to preserve the historic tradition of college yearbooks, which have remained more or less the same since the 1930s, and still keep up with the times. “Everyone is trying to modernize,” she explains. “This is not your grandma’s yearbook.”

In describing the fluctuation of yearbook sales in the ’70s and ’80s, Puntney pinpoints “social trends” as being the primary impetuses for change. The ’70s counter-culture derided traditional institutions like yearbooks, while the ’80s embraced them. In analyzing the major social movements between the yearbook’s heyday and now, one force stands out most prominently: the Web. The fall in yearbook sales follows closely the digital revolution.

If you were to ask modern-day college students to show you some pictures of their collegiate buddies, or even their old high school friends, you can be nearly certain that they wouldn’t go flipping through mug shots in a yearbook.

Expect to see them swivel in their deskchairs, hammer out a url on their laptops, and bring up the seventh-most visited Web site in the world: Facebook.com. Launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student frustrated with the Yard’s dilatory efforts to produce a student directory, Facebook has become the center of many a college student’s universe. Virtually any student with a college e-mail address (e.g. mrsquirlyshow@mail.utexas.edu) can sign up on Facebook and create a profile with pictures, academic information, political leanings, hobbies, favorite movies, books, quotes, and TV shows, and a general “About Me” blurb.

Users can search friends’ profiles, find old high school friends, peruse each other’s photo albums, and send each other messages. There’s even a “wall” where friends can write (in the digital sense) comments that are eerily similar to what you might see scribbled on the blank pages at the backs of yearbooks. In the end, three things give Facebook

an insurmountable advantage over traditional yearbooks: students control the content, it’s constantly changing, and it’s free. And since students at nearly every college in the country can (and do) join Facebook, it’s effectively become the national college yearbook for the 21st century. As Lawrence observes, “Even the yearbook staff — they check their Facebook accounts four or five times a day.”

Facebook is merely one incarnation of the changing trend. The Internet has made information so accessible as to have virtually erased yearbooks’ traditional monopoly on university history. As Putman points out, “If people want to read a story about anything, they just Google it.” With every student having a digital camera and a blog, everyone’s a photojournalist. This was clearly the thought of the teenaged founders of MyYearbook.com, one of whom describes the motivation for creating the site thusly: “It all started during spring break 2005, flipping through a yearbook in my room and realizing it sucked. This is 2005 — why the hell is anyone buying yearbooks anymore?” Between Facebook.com, MyYearbook.com, and the wildly popular MySpace.com, the need to document in photos and stories the rich history of a year at any college in the country is already being met — instantly, universally, and for free.

The Plan

Lawrence and the Cactus higher-ups have grand plans for the 2008 book. They’re hoping to allow students vastly expanded control over the book’s content — way beyond what previous efforts to personalize the book could offer.

Most of them involve the Web. For the 2008 book, students will probably be able to develop their own individual fourpage insert at the back of the book with pictures they submit from their own collections (on Facebook or MySpace or wherever). The thought is, again, that students would be more interested in buying a book that they know has pictures of them in it, especially pictures of their choosing.

The second, and more promising, initiative is a build-yourown yearbook idea. Yearbook publishing technology is to the point where students could go online to a publisher’s Web site, select from a menu of sections which ones they want — College of Liberal Arts coverage, sorority pages, and extended football section with special Rose Bowl spread, say — and the publisher could drag-and-drop those sections into a file S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 0 6 Th e A l c a l d e 45

Michelle Putman was the 2006 editor of the Cactus.

and click print. The made-to-order book arrives shortly thereafter in the mail. Add to that the customized, studentdesigned insert at the back, and what you have is an incredibly personalized, single-edition yearbook. It has the added, brilliant appeal of providing one thing Facebook can’t because it’s always changing. By capturing snapshots of people’s lives as seen on Facebook, the yearbook creates its own, new niche of documenting the rich history that comprises a year on the Web. It’s a sort of advanced scrapbooking for digital junkies that reasserts one of the primary appeals of yearbooks: making history tangible. But while the technology is there, the back-end logistics still need to be worked out. For the 2007 edition, the Cactus staff will have to do without the build-your-own-yearbook option.

With the four-page insert idea still a question mark and the build-your-own-yearbook idea at least a year off, Chin has concluded that she must find hope for the Cactus elsewhere.

She and the design team have decided to give the book a makeover. Portraits? Nipped — moved to a DVD. Size?

Tucked to a lean 250-350 pages. Generic ads? Replaced with “advertorials,” advertisements disguised as articles, and only from local businesses. The staff has decided to “kick it [the Cactus] in another direction.” With the 2007 book, they’re not aiming for the end of your bookshelf or bottom of your keepsake trunk — they’re aiming for your coffee table.

The idea behind a coffee-table book may sound counterintuitive, given what you’ve read thus far. With the super-personalizing technology still a year away, the only option is to go completely the other direction. A coffee-table-style book would “take away the sense that they need to connect to the yearbook,” says Chin. By universalizing the book, she explains, “We’re trying to make it more a history about UT than a history about you.” The hope is also that a coffee-table 46 Th e A l c a l d e S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 0 6

book would appeal to professionals — doctors, dentists, lawyers, business-folk — who have coffee tables in their offices. More than anything else, Chin, a dual journalism and accounting major, hopes to change the book into a product that will sell.

Counterintuitive as it sounds, Chin’s plan is the boldest effort to make the Cactus meet the acid test: will people buy it? When you have to convince people to buy something, you’re already working too hard. The acid test comes from the gut: when you see something, do you want it? Now there’s certainly something to be said for a little foresight.

Perhaps college students don’t look at a yearbook and immediately reach for their check cards, but they might feel differently about the same yearbook 20 years later and be kicking themselves for not planning ahead. According to Chin, every week there’s at least one nostalgic alumnus who calls the Cactus office to order a back issue. But for every person that calls, there are several thousand that didn’t buy a yearbook and aren’t calling. It’s hard to say whether 20 years from now today’s students will be calling to order back issues — or whether anyone will even be around to answer the phone.

This year, a California company will begin scanning every volume of the Cactus ever printed and making them available online. Lawrence hopes the effort will widen awareness of the Cactus and bring in some revenue to help the yearbook stay alive. The 2007 edition may very well be the last, and after 114 years of documenting the history of The University of Texas, the Cactus itself has truly become part of that history. Should the Cactus not survive, it will be tartly poetic that the very thing that put it out of business will be what preserves it. Especially since the Web offers the Cactus its best chance to someday thrive once again.

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