I was listening to NPR Talk of the Nation yesterday, and there was a segment on the demise of college yearbooks.
I thought it was remarkably one-sided. All the interviewees were editors of college yearbooks who bemoaned the loss of subscribers to Facebook and MySpace.
First of all, I would like to see data that conclusively links decline in yearbook sales to rise of Facebook and MySpace usage. To me, that seems like speculation and a new front in the divisive print vs. online wars. The yearbook editors kept saying things along the lines of “a yearbook is something you can have forever, unlike Facebook” without giving people any other good reason to purchase one.
Maybe my view is skewed by UF’s recent yearbook debacle, when the student government president withdrew funding on the basis of low yearbook sales. For me, the fact that I barely knew the UF yearbook existed had nothing to do with MySpace of Facebook, but more because on a campus of 50,000, I don’t think the yearbook can accurately reflect my college experience.
Must’ve been a slow news day. And I’m still confused about how yearbook sales declining equates to a story about “Facebook vs. Yearbook.”
It seems like a typical “Young People are Making Decisions We Don’t Understand, so We’ll Blame it on Technology” story, which isn’t only insulting — it’s bad journalism.
