At its best, a yearbook tells the story of a unique year in the history of a school community. It combines hundreds of narrative threads that we weave together with photographs, various types of writing and supportive visuals to create a school’s story. Yearbook staffers must always think of themselves as storytellers and not just compilers of facts and photographs.

Coverage cannot be random or unfocused. A plan must be developed to bring all the individual stories together. With a theme now fleshed out, it is now time to delve deeper into coverage planning and development.

Essentials to Generating Content & Coverage Ideas

Every yearbook, regardless of the organizational structure, has a core coverage structure. It covers all the traditional events, clubs and sports that occur in the school. This structure can be broken down into the following categories:

• Academics: Includes all areas of study plus all the support services the school (library, media, counseling, etc.) and anything students might do outside the school environment like college classes, SAT, ACT, tutoring and more.
• Athletics: Includes all school sponsored sports as well as competitive and non-competitive activities outside of school (sports clubs, casual fitness, etc.)
• Activities: Includes all school-sanctioned clubs and organizations but may also include off-campus activities (youth groups, volunteer opportunities, etc.)
• Lifestyle: Includes anything students do outside the school, from practicing their spirituality to part-time jobs to enjoying popular culture. Events are occasions we normally find on the school calendar, from Homecoming to Prom from the fall play to the winter pep rally.

Although content for these categories are relatively easy to gather, we must keep in mind that it should work in tandem with our theme. When developing your coverage structure, keep the theme in mind and, whenever possible, pull in elements from it.

Secondary Coverage

When developing a page ladder, we often outline the essential coverage elements that we will cover. Although this does give us a great start, we cannot forget to investigate secondary coverage elements for each spread.

Secondary coverage gives our publication several key opportunities that allow us to broaden our reach and further entice our readers.
• It enhances our core content with supplemental facts, quotes, and opinions.
• It allows us to include information that does not fit in traditional copy, captions, or other content structure
• It gives us the unique opportunity to bring together art and copy to entice the reader to stay on a page a little longer.

Most importantly, secondary coverage gives us the opportunity to carry our theme throughout the book in a variety of unique ways.
** Some examples of this are:**
• Create survey questions that relate directly to the theme.
• Use theme colours, graphics, and typography on your infographics.
• Create various sidebars and personality profiles that incorporate with the theme.

Getting secondary coverage information does take work however, unlike your core coverage, it can be done nearly any time of year. You can conduct surveys, interview students, or do research at any time.

Some of the data that can be included is:
• information gathered through student polls, surveys, or other opinion-based information.
• interesting quotes, trends and viewpoints can create unique coverage options.
• general club, class, sport, or team information can often make dry, normally uninteresting, data exciting.
• numerical data, statistics and timelines can be made more palatable.

Once data is gathered, there are multiple ways to display the secondary coverage.
Some of these include:

• Polls/Surveys and Graphs: Polls provide a quick read of relevant information. The answers can be displayed as graphics, graphs, infographics, and more.
• Charts: The best way to quickly display information. They can incorporate your theme’s colours for different areas. Some best examples are pie charts, bar charts, scoreboards, fast fact boxes, etc...
• Lists: A great format to display information in a clear and simple manner; particularly if you are in a space-crunch. They can be ordered using numbers or simply use bullet points.
• Quotes: Interesting and compelling quotes grab readers’ attention and leave them hungry for more. They can be visually appealing when used as an independent design element. It can be a great way to tie in thematic typography!
• Sidebar Copy: Always shorter than a feature story, they provide an in-depth look at one aspect of the main story. You can include pull-quotes, images, graphics, statistics, or other visual representation.

Below are other visual representations of secondary coverage options:

Hidden Story Coverage

The most important thing to know about coverage is that there are no stories about events like homecoming, football, or English class. Although we have spreads devoted to each of those, it is more about structuring our topics not about the story-telling that readers should find on each spread. Stories are written about people and their experiences. These stories can come in all shapes and sizes – from captions to formal profiles, from quote collections to short anecdotes – but all those moments combine to form the narrative of the year.

Although we work to gather the coverage for these stories, another level does exist that often goes overlooked. Hidden story coverage is looking past the obvious coverage assignments and digging deeper. In other words, looking for the intimate moments, heartwarming stories or pieces that would go overlooked.

An example of this would be:
• A young woman assistant trainer who tapes dozens of ankles each day and endures hazing but loves the job.
• About a girl in World Literature who never speaks out in class but who has her own blog.
• A man who graduated from your school, discovered his love for literature after working at Target for several years and who has returned as a teacher.

Finding this kind of hidden coverage is key to making your publication that much more meaningful and impactful on your school and community. These stories can be placed in the yearbook as a secondary coverage piece or even as its own spread (as a showstopper).