Yearbook Chat with Jim

A few weeks ago, host Jim Jordan read two articles on the Walsworth Yearbooks blog about covering controversial topics in a yearbook. Those two articles were written by a father/daughter yearbook team, which sparked the idea for this episode. 

Jim Jordan was a yearbook adviser for 35 years, and during that time all three of his children were on his staff. So he decided to reach out to the authors of those articles, Jon and Lucy Bickell, from Eastern Lebanon County High School in Meyerstown, Pennsylvania. He also asked his friend Brit Taylor, CJE, whose daughter, Maggie, is currently the Editor-in-chief of their yearbook staff. 

These two dynamic duos shared what it's like to work together with a close family member, and the extra challenges they faced working to create a yearbook during a global pandemic. We hope you enjoy. 

In this extra special episode, Ask Mike and Yearbook Chat with Jim team up to talk about promoting your yearbook! Hosts Mike Taylor, CJE, and Jim Jordan are joined by three members of the Walsworth marketing team, Jenica Hallman, CJE, Jimmy Gilligan and Sarah Scott. They share tips for writing press releases, ideas for promoting your yearbook, and why you want to promote your 2021 yearbook more than ever before!

Listen to the episode, then share your marketing with us! Send press releases to [email protected] or [email protected], and be sure to tag Walsworth Yearbooks in any social media promotions you post. We would love to share your work. Find us on Instagram  @walsworthyearbooks, Twitter @yearbookforever, and Facebook. 

Tiffany Kopcak was recently named JEA's H.L. Hall Yearbook Adviser of the Year Special Recognition Adviser. Her staff's 2020 yearbook was one of host Jim Jordan's favorite volumes, and they're known for their willingness to go in new directions for coverage and design. Listen in to hear more about her love of her home state Virginia and how her yearbook staff has been working through the challenges posed by the past two school years. 

Patty Gomez has led an interesting life, and it's given her a unique perspective on education. She is the yearbook adviser at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and was recently named a JEA Rising Star for her commitment to scholastic journalism. In this interview, Patty shares a little bit about growing up in Venezuela, her work in chemistry, and why it's so important to balance STEM education with the arts. 

This is the second of a two-part Rising Star series. Be sure to check out host Jim Jordan's interview with Rising Star Heather Rice in the previous episode. 

For the first episode of 2021, host Jim Jordan interviews JEA Rising Star Heather Rice, from One School of the Arts in Longwood, Florida. Rising Star trophies are awarded to advisers who are in their first five years of advising and have shown great dedication to scholastic journalism. Heather took over a yearbook program that had previously been run by parents, and in only five years helped bring it to an award-winning level.

In this episode, host Jim Jordan chats with November 2020 Adviser of Note Emily Arnold. Listen to her story about how she built two different award-winning publications programs and how she is coping with in-person teaching and advising this year.

On today’s episode, host Jim Jordan discusses the ways yearbook staffs continue to manage, create and sometimes even thrive in the midst of a pandemic. He spoke with five yearbook advisers from four high schools all over the country to listen to their stories about yearbook during COVID-19.

Ashley Dias, Americas High School, El Paso, Texas

Susan Colyer, Southside High School, Fort Smith, Arkansas

Kaitlin Beaudet and Michelle Kuebler, Williamsville North High School, Williamsville, New York

Hillary Currier, Tigard High School, Tigard, Oregon

Susan McNulty became a yearbook adviser early in her career as a teacher, but budget cuts tore her away from the role. Years later, she took over the J.W. Mitchell yearbook program the same year her daughter served as editor-in-chief (the outgoing adviser had assigned the roles before McNulty took over). She took over a strong yearbook program, and books under her leadership have won recognition from all over, including the All-American from NSPA, Gold Medalist from CSPA, and All-Florida from FSPA. In this episode, McNulty and podcast host Jim Jordan discuss her career, her classroom, and the pressure of finishing a yearbook while the world grapples with the coronavirus. You can learn more in the accompanying blog post on the Walsworth Yearbooks blog!

Susan Massy has been advising yearbooks for more than 30 years, and most of that has been at her current school. Yearbooks produced under her guidance have won many awards. In this interview with Jim Jordan, Massy discusses how much she struggled her first year, what made her come back to a second year, and the one big thing that made her yearbook experience better. In this interview, she recalled how she learned that yearbooks can be a true journalistic endeavor.  

In the interview, she shares how inspiring her students can be, and how much she loves watching them be creative and problem-solve.  Her big advice for fellow yearbook advisers is: “We need to learn to coach, not just manage.”

You can’t have an interview in 2020 without addressing what a crazy year it’s been. Massy and Jordan discuss the ways the impactful year has affected her yearbook. When they learned that spring sports were cancelled, they replaced it with COVID-19 coverage. Watching her students juggle all the changes helped Massy identify who would be her leaders for the 2021 school year.

As the staff prepares for the 2021 book, they’re having what Massy calls both “freakout moments” and “aha moments.” Massy says their biggest challenge at the moment is putting together a yearbook ladder. They’ve increased their summer coverage, and are crowdsourcing for both photos and story ideas. They’re using several different mediums to collect these from the student body.  

Massy shared her predictions for the 2021 yearbook. “I think our yearbook will have more first-person stories than we’ve ever had. I think we’ll have more people writing for us or with us than we ever have. So much of the content is going to have to come from beyond the staff.”

They’ll be letting preconceived notions of what a yearbook “should be” fall away, and allowing this year’s book to take a new form that works with the current situation.   

2020 has been an odd year for everyone. We've all had to learn to navigate brand-new challenges. For Michelle Shue and her yearbook staff at Davie County High School in Mocksville, North Carolina. Like many schools around the country, they didn't have much warning when they learned they wouldn't be returning to the classroom. With their final deadline approaching, Shue and her staff buckled down and submitted half their book's pages in a two-week window!