A picture is worth a thousand words: What’s the plan for RJRs yearbook this year?

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Kathleen Hale, Social Media Coordinator

At first glance a yearbook may seem relatively simple, after all, it is just a couple hundred pages of pictures and captions, right? While this is true, a yearbook is so much more than that. The yearbook is a hardcopy documentation of everyone who attended and everything that happened at school throughout the year. 

The book itself is fundamentally a piece of history. RJ Reynolds High School was founded in 1923, and practically every year since then students have worked hard to put together and publish a yearbook, The Black and Gold. Do the math and you will find that is close to 100 publications, that is a lot of books and a whole lot of history.  

In these crazy times that we are living in, it may leave some people questioning, what is the plan for a yearbook this year? We are not even actually in school so how will we fill the pages? After talking to some of the yearbook staff and the class advisor, you can rest assured that everything is under control. The staff is working very hard to keep the tradition alive, they are going to try and keep the 2020-2021 yearbook as normal as possible.

“Our plan for the yearbook this year is the same as every year,” senior co-editor and business manager of the Black and Gold, Hollis Daniel said. “We will be working hard to make the book published and beautiful as always.” 

Another question that might arise, as we are living in a virtual world, is if they might try and publish a virtual copy. 

To keep it traditional, Traci Latta, yearbook class advisor, said, “The yearbook will be a hard copy book this year.”

However, not all aspects of the book creating process will be traditional, 

“Due to COVID restrictions, we cannot ask staff members to go out and take photographs,” Latta said. “We will be crowdsourcing more material. That will look like asking students to share their own photographs and we will also be incorporating more polls and surveys that will be turned into infographics… We are lucky because our yearbook uses an internal version of InDesign and Photoshop. Herff-Jones, our publisher, provides that for us and all yearbook students have access to those programs from home.”

While this is not the way that pictures for extracurricular activities in the yearbook have been taken in the past, it might make for an even more personal publication, being that the pictures will have been taken from a variety of RJR students and sent in to the staff. It makes the yearbook into even more of a group effort, involving the whole school in a small way. 

“We are also going to be asking people to send in photos for what we specifically ask for so students will be able to participate a lot more this year in the yearbook,” Daniel said. 

The yearbook staff has synchronous class periods where they collaborate and make group decisions about the formatting of the book. 

“We zoom as a group every class, and we have been tackling fonts, color schemes, cover ideas, end sheets etc.” Daniel noted, “ When we tackled those areas we were working in groups, as it is easier to come up with ideas. We all come together as a group and choose the ideas we like best.” 

The Black and Gold has also started an instagram account where they hope to be able to interact with students more easily and gather information and photos. “Brian Cohen and I are running it. This has helped us get the yearbook out there, as well as helping us with poll answers and will help with gathering photos.” Daniel explained. 

Individual student pictures are the main event when it comes to the yearbook. Although, because we are not in school and not able to have students photographed, these might have to be left out of the book altogether, with the exception of seniors who will be photographed this fall. Latta explains that it is still undecided about the freshman, sophomore and junior classes,  

“So far, there is no indication that we will not have student photographs… Seniors will be photographed in November and there will be plans for other classes, but we must adhere to district return plans before we know what that will look like.” Latta said. In the event that we go back to school, “It will only affect our plan for the better since it would be easier to do what we normally do.”

In any case, we look forward to seeing the Black and Gold, in all its glory, when it is revealed at the end of the year.