years, sales had fallen by nearly 10,000 books, from theall-time high of 14,083 in 1982 to 4,403 in 1994. It wasa steady slide: a few hundred every year. Aside from theoccasional pause, that slide has continued to the present,bringing the Cactus to its current, critical state. It’s up tothis year’s editor, JoAnna Chin, and her staff to figure outwhy the Cactus is dying and what, if anything, can bedone to save it.

What the Problem Is NotThe purpose of the Cactus, says Lawrence, is to docu-

ment in photos and articles the rich history that compris-es a year at The University of Texas. For Chin and herstaff, though, capturing that richness presents a logisticalnightmare. Consider for a moment just how much stuffthere is to cover. With so many people doing so manythings in so many different places at any given moment,it can seem, frankly, hopeless. And at first glance it wouldalso seem reasonable to believe that the yearbook’s woescan largely be attributed to the project’s massive scope.

Yet there appears to be no relationship between cam-pus size and sales. In 1982, when the Cactus sold themost copies ever, 48,145 students roamed the campus— roughly as many as matriculate today. So, too, are stu-dents now spared the grueling hike across campus topick up a book that weighs roughly the same as a bob-cat. In 2005, apparently enough students came pantinginto the office that the staff realized that mailing the bookto anyone who bought it would eliminate a considerabledeterrent for potential buyers. Gone now are the dayswhen so many students neglected to retrieve their booksthat stacks of unclaimed yearbooks began to build up allover the office. Yet even with postal workers now luggingthe books to students’ mailboxes, the net effect appearsto be not that more people are now buying the book butmerely that all those who buy it now get it.

It would also seem reasonable to believe that the num-ber of portraits taken and the Cactus’ sales numbers arerelated. In fact, a glance at the last 20 or so years shows

PRIL 2006 WAS NOT A GOOD MONTH

for Michelle Putman. The then-edi-tor of the Cactus yearbook was just

over a month away from completing the113th edition when it came to her attentionthat sales were down several hundred booksfrom the same time last year. Panic ensued.In a frenzied meeting with senior staff, it wasresolved to launch an aggressive marketingeffort. T-shirts were ordered and a table wasset up on the West Mall to boost sales.Legions of yearbook staffers took to the side-walks hoping to “get the word out” on theCactus. But it was too little, too late. The2006 Cactus sold the fewest copies of anyedition in decades — barely more than2,000.

The Cactus’ contract with Walsworth Publishing endswith the 2007 edition, and after two years in the red,Walsworth is disinclined to renew. Unless the yearbooksells 3,000 copies of the ’07 edition, it will relinquish itstitle as the oldest publication on campus. Why? Becauseit will cease to exist. In fact, if you think of a yearbook asa collection of thousands of stamp-sized portraits of yourclassmates, the Cactus yearbook you remember is alreadygone.

When Kathy Lawrence arrived at The University ofTexas in 1994 to direct Texas Student Publications, sheinherited a withering Cactus. During the previous 12

Discussed: Why the Cactus You Knew Is Already Gone H Googling for Memories

H The Cachet of the Cactus Past H Cactus as Coffee-table Book H Visiting

Facebook.com Five Times a Day H Cactus as Scrapbook

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AFTER 113 EDITIONS, WHY THE CACTUS YEARBOOK IS ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION

b y T i m Ta l i a f e r r o

... ? GROUP PHOTO: At left, 113 years’ worth of Cactus yearbooks, from 1894 through 2006.

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the two lines streaking downhill on almost exactly the sameslope. That is, until this past year, when the Cactus switchedphotographers from one based in New York to Austin-basedTOPS. With the lovable TOPS owner and photographerArnie Levine (known to students as just “Arnie”) hailing fromjust down 23rd Street, he could be at every freshman orien-tation with a booth (and a throng of beautiful girls he’denlist) getting the fish to pose for pictures. The number ofportraits went from 200 to 2,000 — a disproportionateamount of whom, surprise, surprise, were men. Plus, whenstudents inevitably missed their scheduled appointment tohave their pictures taken, they didn’t have to buy a planeticket to New York to get into the yearbook. They just had towaltz over to TOPS’ West Campus studio and smile. The 10-fold increase in portraits, though, had no effect on sales.

One could not be faulted for suspecting that perhaps stu-dents simply don’t buy yearbooks anymore. While to a large

extent that’s true on college campuses, high school yearbooksales have more or less stayed the same for the past severaldecades. According to Jeanne Acton, assistant academicdirector of journalism for the University InterscholasticLeague, high school yearbook sales depend mostly on thesocioeconomics of a school district. In the suburbs, sales areas good as ever; in the inner city, not so good, but still noth-ing worse than usual.

What Might Be the ProblemPerhaps one problem that college yearbooks face is that

because students do buy yearbooks in high school, theycome to view yearbooks in general as primarily high schoolartifacts. But the more fundamental difference between highschools and colleges is that in high school you identify withyour class. (Remember your old class T-shirts bearing sloganslike “Stayin’ Alive, Class of ’85” or “Seniors 2001: A Space

42 The Alca lde September/October 2006

JoAnna Chin is the 2007 editor of the Cactus.

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copies to the 23,000 stu-dents at K-State, down fromits all-time high of 16,000 inthe ’80s. Despite enormousmarketing efforts in recentyears, its sales have more orless stayed flat.

The Royal Purple’s advisor,Linda Puntney, also the exec-utive director of the NationalJournalism EducationAssociation, wrote her mas-ter’s thesis, “An Analysis ofthe College Yearbook: Its his-toric Role and Contem-porary Status,” on the falland resurgence of collegeyearbooks in the late ’70sand early ’80s. She says col-lege yearbooks now face aninteresting dilemma: how topreserve the historic tradi-tion of college yearbooks,which have remained moreor less the same since the1930s, and still keep upwith the times. “Everyone is trying to modernize,” sheexplains. “This is not your grandma’s yearbook.”

In describing the fluctuation of yearbook sales in the ’70sand ’80s, Puntney pinpoints “social trends” as being the pri-mary impetuses for change. The ’70s counter-culture derid-ed traditional institutions like yearbooks, while the ’80sembraced them. In analyzing the major social movementsbetween the yearbook’s heyday and now, one force standsout most prominently: the Web. The fall in yearbook salesfollows closely the digital revolution.

If you were to ask modern-day college students to showyou some pictures of their collegiate buddies, or even theirold high school friends, you can be nearly certain that theywouldn’t go flipping through mug shots in a yearbook.Expect to see them swivel in their deskchairs, hammer out aurl on their laptops, and bring up the seventh-most visitedWeb site in the world: Facebook.com. Launched in 2004 byMark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student frustrated with theYard’s dilatory efforts to produce a student directory,Facebook has become the center of many a college student’suniverse. Virtually any student with a college e-mail address(e.g. mrsquirlyshow@mail.utexas.edu) can sign up onFacebook and create a profile with pictures, academic infor-mation, political leanings, hobbies, favorite movies, books,quotes, and TV shows, and a general “About Me” blurb.Users can search friends’ profiles, find old high schoolfriends, peruse each other’s photo albums, and send eachother messages. There’s even a “wall” where friends canwrite (in the digital sense) comments that are eerily similarto what you might see scribbled on the blank pages at thebacks of yearbooks. In the end, three things give Facebook

an insurmountable advan-tage over traditional year-books: students control thecontent, it’s constantlychanging, and it’s free. Andsince students at nearlyevery college in the countrycan (and do) join Facebook,it’s effectively become thenational college yearbook forthe 21st century. AsLawrence observes, “Eventhe yearbook staff — theycheck their Facebookaccounts four or five times aday.”

Facebook is merely oneincarnation of the changingtrend. The Internet has madeinformation so accessible asto have virtually erased year-books’ traditional monopolyon university history. AsPutman points out, “If peo-ple want to read a storyabout anything, they just

Google it.” With every student having a digital camera and ablog, everyone’s a photojournalist. This was clearly thethought of the teenaged founders of MyYearbook.com, one ofwhom describes the motivation for creating the site thusly:“It all started during spring break 2005, flipping through ayearbook in my room and realizing it sucked. This is 2005 —why the hell is anyone buying yearbooks anymore?” BetweenFacebook.com, MyYearbook.com, and the wildly popularMySpace.com, the need to document in photos and storiesthe rich history of a year at any college in the country isalready being met — instantly, universally, and for free.

The PlanLawrence and the Cactus higher-ups have grand plans for

the 2008 book. They’re hoping to allow students vastlyexpanded control over the book’s content — way beyondwhat previous efforts to personalize the book could offer.Most of them involve the Web. For the 2008 book, studentswill probably be able to develop their own individual four-page insert at the back of the book with pictures they submitfrom their own collections (on Facebook or MySpace orwherever). The thought is, again, that students would bemore interested in buying a book that they know has pic-tures of them in it, especially pictures of their choosing.

The second, and more promising, initiative is a build-your-own yearbook idea. Yearbook publishing technology is to thepoint where students could go online to a publisher’s Website, select from a menu of sections which ones they want —College of Liberal Arts coverage, sorority pages, and extend-ed football section with special Rose Bowl spread, say — andthe publisher could drag-and-drop those sections into a file

Brian Vanicek was the 1983editor of the Cactus.

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mentally, the more you print, the lower the unit cost is.” TheCactus’ paltry sales shave the profit margin ever thinner anddrive the price of the book ever higher. The 2007 book willcost $75, up from $65 in 2006. Chin, though, doubts thatmoney is the issue. She asks: “Students drop $150 on a text-book like it’s nothing, but they won’t pay half that for a year-book?” Of course, with textbooks, they have no choice.

The most common complaint that both Lawrence andChin hear from uninterested students is that yearbooks arenot personal enough — that students don’t relate to them.Either they aren’t in the book, they don’t know anyone in thebook, or both. So why would they buy it? Editors have foryears been trying to “personalize” yearbooks by offeringgroup shots for free to any student and allowing studentssome control over the yearbook’s contents. Yet as the Cactusstaff saw with the jump in portraits last year, merely addingpictures of more people won’t turn the tide. It’s no mysterywhy it feels less personal when students heave open the 500-page Cactus and find unfamiliar faces staring back at them. Ingeneral, students who participate in taking group photos arelargely the same students who buy the yearbook anyway. Itjust doesn’t seem to matter enough to the rest of the stu-dents to inspire them to put more effort into a productthey’re not interested in buying in the first place.

What Everyone Pretty Much Agrees Are ProblemsIt’s hard to deny that the Cactus suffers from a buzz prob-

lem. In 1983, the Cactus was so anchored into the epicen-ter of campus that it formed its own social organization,Theta Sigma Pi (alluding to Texas Student Publications), thatrented-out downtown clubs to throw parties. The Cactus elitéwould even charter limos and sip champagne as they rode totheir parties. When asked why he thought the modernCactus was struggling, 1983 editor Brian Vanicek, BJ ’83, LifeMember, noted his staff’s esprit de corps and wondered, “Idon’t know what the attitude is about the yearbook anymore.Is it still cool?”

Today, an astounding portion of the student body squintswhen you ask them about the Cactus. The what? There’s aUT yearbook? Fewer copies sold means less awareness meanseven fewer copies sold the next year. With every year thatsales go down, it gets harder and harder to bounce back. Infact, in the last two-and-a-half decades, once sales fall, theyhave almost never climbed back. Think of the difference inbuzz between one out of every four people buying the bookand one out of every 25. That makes for a lot more squint-ing.

Despite the continued success of high school yearbooks,college yearbooks as you know them appear to be a deadconcept. All around the country, college yearbooks are dying,and even the best college yearbooks find themselves clawingjust to stay even. The Kansas State Royal Purple is widelyregarded as one of the top college yearbooks in the country.Few college yearbook programs in the nation can boast of asmany Gold and Silver Crowns, the prestigious national year-book awards given by the Columbia Scholastic PressAssociation. Yet in 2006, the Royal Purple sold a mere 4,000

Odyssey”?) Not so in college. At any given commencementceremony, the “graduating class” has students who wereenrolled for any number of semesters. Plus, with two com-mencement ceremonies each calendar year, the students whograduate in May are only nominally in the same “graduatingclass” as the December grads. Still, weak class identity isnothing new on college campuses. It surely existed in theearly ’80s when yearbooks were selling like mad.

Weak marketing might also be to blame. It can come as ashock to some college yearbook staffers who never had tomarket their high school yearbooks that in college, not onlydo they have to produce the book, they have to convincepeople to buy it as well. Both Putman and Chin cite theirmarketing responsibilities as a distracting burden that, in anideal world, a yearbook editor shouldn’t have to worry about.Unfortunately for modern college yearbook editors, market-ing is the burden they must most concern themselves with iftheir books are to be read by anyone other than the writers.

Though the April 2006 marketing blitz was almost surelytoo late in coming for it to have a significant effect on sales,Putman fervently defends her team’s sales efforts. They gotmore people into the book than the year before — about10,000 students total. The staff e-mailed all of those studentsto tell them they were in the yearbook. Then they mailed let-ters to those students’ parents telling them their kid was inthe book. Then they bought an eight-page spread in theDaily Texan as a way of offering students a preview of thebook. “No one can say we haven’t tried,” she says. “I dideverything in my power.”

Chin hopes to bring new life and new focus to the market-ing effort. The Cactus, she says, “is not in your face enough.”She wants to start marketing sooner. To help her, she’s enlist-ed a panel of students — one from each college — to serveon an advisory board for the Cactus sales team. These repswill make it their business to see that Cactus writers and pho-tographers attend every noteworthy event their college hostsover the course of the year. “Complete coverage” is the idea,via a horde of informants.

Yet it’s unclear exactly what this marketing board has to dowith marketing. Though it will surely expand and improvethe book’s campus coverage, it does not address any majorcomplaint of non-buyers. Few people question the book’seditorial quality, and will more shots of deans and professorsat college events send students flocking into the yearbookoffice? From a sales perspective, that’s just offering con-sumers more of the same. What seems to be the most daunt-ing (and as yet unaddressed) challenge facing the Cactus ishow it plans to shake off its 113-year image and sell aredesigned book without having an actual copy to show.Theoretically, at least, the 2007 yearbook could arrive oncampus in September 2007 to great hype and generate enor-mous interest, but by then the Cactus’ fate will have alreadybeen decided.

College yearbooks are also really expensive. For the Cactus,overhead kills. “You know, it’s funny,” Lawrence says, “Itcosts like $50,000 to produce one yearbook because you’vegot all this back end that has to go into it. But then incre-

‘Students drop $150 on a textbook like it’s nothing, but they won’tpay half that for a yearbook?’

and click print. The made-to-order book arrives shortlythereafter in the mail. Add to that the customized, student-designed insert at the back, and what you have is an incred-ibly personalized, single-edition yearbook. It has the added,brilliant appeal of providing one thing Facebook can’tbecause it’s always changing. By capturing snapshots of peo-ple’s lives as seen on Facebook, the yearbook creates its own,new niche of documenting the rich history that comprises ayear on the Web. It’s a sort of advanced scrapbooking for dig-ital junkies that reasserts one of the primary appeals of year-books: making history tangible. But while the technology isthere, the back-end logistics still need to be worked out. Forthe 2007 edition, the Cactus staff will have to do without thebuild-your-own-yearbook option.

With the four-page insert idea still a question mark and thebuild-your-own-yearbook idea at least a year off, Chin hasconcluded that she must find hope for the Cactus elsewhere.She and the design team have decided to give the book amakeover. Portraits? Nipped — moved to a DVD. Size?Tucked to a lean 250-350 pages. Generic ads? Replaced with“advertorials,” advertisements disguised as articles, and onlyfrom local businesses. The staff has decided to “kick it [theCactus] in another direction.” With the 2007 book, they’renot aiming for the end of your bookshelf or bottom of yourkeepsake trunk — they’re aiming for your coffee table.

The idea behind a coffee-table book may sound counterin-tuitive, given what you’ve read thus far. With the super-per-sonalizing technology still a year away, the only option is togo completely the other direction. A coffee-table-style bookwould “take away the sense that they need to connect to theyearbook,” says Chin. By universalizing the book, sheexplains, “We’re trying to make it more a history about UTthan a history about you.” The hope is also that a coffee-table

book would appeal to professionals — doctors, dentists,lawyers, business-folk — who have coffee tables in theiroffices. More than anything else, Chin, a dual journalism andaccounting major, hopes to change the book into a productthat will sell.

Counterintuitive as it sounds, Chin’s plan is the boldesteffort to make the Cactus meet the acid test: will people buyit? When you have to convince people to buy something,you’re already working too hard. The acid test comes fromthe gut: when you see something, do you want it? Nowthere’s certainly something to be said for a little foresight.Perhaps college students don’t look at a yearbook and imme-diately reach for their check cards, but they might feel differ-ently about the same yearbook 20 years later and be kickingthemselves for not planning ahead. According to Chin, everyweek there’s at least one nostalgic alumnus who calls theCactus office to order a back issue. But for every person thatcalls, there are several thousand that didn’t buy a yearbookand aren’t calling. It’s hard to say whether 20 years from nowtoday’s students will be calling to order back issues — orwhether anyone will even be around to answer the phone.

This year, a California company will begin scanning everyvolume of the Cactus ever printed and making them availableonline. Lawrence hopes the effort will widen awareness ofthe Cactus and bring in some revenue to help the yearbookstay alive. The 2007 edition may very well be the last, andafter 114 years of documenting the history of The Universityof Texas, the Cactus itself has truly become part of that histo-ry. Should the Cactus not survive, it will be tartly poetic thatthe very thing that put it out of business will be what pre-serves it. Especially since the Web offers the Cactus its bestchance to someday thrive once again.

Michelle Putman was the 2006 editor of the Cactus.

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