The sales of yearbooks have continued to rise over the past few years and is showing no sign of slowing down. The yearbook staff works for 9 months to craft and perfect the books that students hold onto for years. There are 23 students on staff that work in and out of school to make the book as best they can.
Seniors Katherine Newburg and Ashley Crabbs give the most time as Co Editors-in-chief. They have to review every page for spelling and grammar mistakes and to make sure the design is the best it can be.
“I constantly feel like I have to be working on something for the yearbook because I am always worried that we are not going to get the pages done when the deadline comes,” Crabbs said. “It’s a difficult job and I can’t imagine doing it alone.”
There are several other positions on staff that contribute to the final product. Photographers and writers are all assigned pages and fill up the space with interesting things going on at GEHS.
Photographers are constantly going to extra curricular activities and tracking down students for quotes.
The rest of the staff is responsible for not only the story, but also the design and graphics on their page.
“We help the staff in anyway possible to create the best looking page they can,” Crabbs said.
The section editors, seniors Nikayla Kussatz and Sydney Borstelman, are in charge of sports, senior ads, weekly stories and portraits. All the pages go through them for editing before reaching the final checkpoint.
“I like being in a leadership position,” Borstelman said. “It makes me feel not completely useless.”
The process starts with ideas. Members of the staff are assigned partners and a certain week. These weeklies cover anything interesting going on during their assigned week. The staff has to go through previous yearbooks to make sure they have not covered that topic in the years before.
Once the editors approve the ideas, they get to work collecting pictures and quotes. On every weekly page there is a bar, this year it is a ‘From the mouth of’ segment, in which one student is asked a question about their high school careers.
If it is not a weekly or bar segment it is called an alt-coverage. This could be anything from a small story to a poll to graphics made by the staff. These stories are often about big events that happen outside of school.
“My favorite spread that I’ve made would probably be my Olympics focus spread from this year,” Newburg said. “I really just love how the layout of the page ended up and the design with the titles was really fun to create.”
From start to finish a spread of two pages can take anywhere from a week and a half to a month to complete. It goes through multiple rounds of editing and revising before it can be sent off to the plant.
There are several deadlines throughout the year where specific pages have to be done in order to get the book finished in time for distribution.
The yearbook runs both picture day and the distribution of books. The staff has to round up every student to make sure they get a picture in the book. At the end of the year the staff gets to pass out The Trailblazer to the entire school.
“Distribution is a little frustrating because students don’t remember what their last name starts with,” Kussatz said.
Having a role on the yearbook staff can be very beneficial to students later on in their careers. It teaches not only strong writing and graphic design, but also leadership and time management skills.
“I plan on pursuing a degree in journalism at either Butler University or Oklahoma State University,” Crabbs said.
Every year, The Trailblazer staff distributes a book that is better than the one before. Cataloging the events of one school year into 252 pages, covering the big events while also making sure everyone is included. They get a chance to create something that will be looked at 30 years from now.
“I absolutely love being a part of yearbook and working with everyone,” Newburg said. “It’s been a great three years working on the book and I’ll be sad when it ends.”