"DVD 'adds more life' to high school yearbooks?"
By Jefferson Graham
USA Today, June 8, 2004

...Many high school students this graduation season are leaving with two yearbooks ? a print version and a DVD. Graduation-supply giant Jostens has started testing DVD yearbooks to accompany the traditional big book?

...A DVD "adds more life to the yearbook," says Manorin Sieng, 16, a sophomore at Long Beach Polytechnic High School near Los Angeles. "The pages come alive." He was technical director of the school's "Signs of the Time" DVD, which sells for $75 in a joint package with the print edition.

...Print yearbook deadlines tend to be in February or March and miss key spring events, from the prom to sports like tennis and golf. A digital yearbook can cover it all and be finished as late as two weeks before graduation.

...Some schools even wait for graduations in May and June. Cameras are on hand for the ceremony, and the DVD gets mailed off in summer instead of being handed out the last week of school.

...Jonathan Hayes, a video teacher who oversaw Long Beach Poly's DVD yearbook, says the school's 4,800 students will buy about 1,400 DVDs. "We won't make a dime on this," he says. "It's about the experience the kids get putting this together."

...Students shoot and edit video and still images, and put the productions together with supplied software. They transmit finished files (a sports section, for instance) over the Internet to the company producing the final package.

...Jostens dominates graduation season with cap and gown rentals, class ring sales and yearbook services. It had $788 million in revenue in 2003 and produced 8 million yearbooks. Only a handful of Jostens' high school clients have made DVDs, but it expects that to change quickly.

..."I've been in charge of my own high school reunions, and I'd kill to have some video from those years for us all to watch," says John Lund, head of Jostens' Yearbook Interactive unit.

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