Marketing and Audience Engagement
Aside from simply producing newsworthy and engaging materials for publishing, marketing our publications is crucial to a successful program. For the yearbook, marketing targets current and potential readers, plus students who may be interested in joining media classes. Branding is also important—a consistent identity makes it easier for journalists and readers to communicate with each other.
Yearbook Advertisements
Selling ads in the yearbook to local businesses is an important way we make money as a publication and keep yearbook prices as low as possible. We also sell ads, at a lower price, to families, clubs and teams to honor and congratulate graduating seniors.
Business Ads
Senior Ads
Organization Finances
In 2025, the yearbook program ended the school year with about $2,000 less than it started with. Luckily, we had enough saved in the account that it didn’t cause any significant issues. This happened because over the course of producing the book, decided to add pages and a fancy cover finish, and purchased some new equipment, and we didn’t have the increase in sales or advertising necessary to cover those costs.
This year, we’re being more conservative with where we spend money and working hard to promote the yearbook to increase sales. We’re saving money with a simple cover finish and fewer pages. We’re also looking at switching to another yearbook publisher in order to keep printing costs down. Every decision involving finances now revolves around careful cost-benefit analysis. We ask: How will a decision benefit our school community? Is it worth the added costs to our program, or any costs we may have to pass along to students buying the yearbook?
Recruiting Students
Last January, before students chose classes for this school year, I worked with the English teachers to give every non-senior English class a three-minute pitch for joining student media programs at North. I highlighted the various activities that go into the publications, the “perks,” and educational benefits of learning journalism.
This year, I have a strong, dedicated group of students on staff who care about the work we produce.
Branding: Style Guides
Creating style guides to supplement the Associated Press style for specific publications is a subtle but important aspect of branding for a given publication. It helps readers more easily understand our work.
Nikean Yearbook
Each year, a yearbook must come up with a style guide that dictates the book’s fonts, colors, tone, grammar, and other conventions to ensure cohesion across spreads throughout the book.
This style guide, compiled and formatted by our Academics Editor, contains those details for staff to reference. This can also serve as a formatting template for next year’s staff to use to create a new guide.
The B Square Bulletin
A few months into my work with The B Square Bulletin, I started picking up on some conventions Dave, my editor, followed. While I picked up on his preferred styling quickly, given his efforts to expand his team of freelancers, I knew having a document with deviations from AP style would be a useful resource to start and maintain. Below is the most recent version, and it continues to grow as we identify common corrections and some more of Dave’s stylistic preferences.