MU yearbook shelved for good

COLUMBIA — For more than a century, MU students could count on the Savitar yearbook as a keepsake to reflect on campus life long after adulthood’s unceremonious arrival.

Now, thanks to declining sales and a student body that increasingly gets its information online, the Savitar is no more.

A monthly Web version is all that remains of the storied yearbook, first published in 1894. A stack of old Savitars has been converted into a makeshift table in the yearbook’s campus office, literally and figuratively gathering dust.

“In this visual age, there are so many more ways to look back,” said Matt Sokoloff, a senior journalism major and Savitar editor in chief. “And it’s such a large campus, no yearbook can cover an individual’s life story.”

While yearbooks remain a staple of the American high school experience, college yearbooks have fallen on hard times in the past decade, said Marc Wood, a spokesman for Associated Collegiate Press, which represents campus newspapers and yearbooks.

Of the association’s 700 members, only 100 or so continue to publish yearbooks, he said. Some, like MU, have converted to Web-only formats, while other schools have switched to DVD formats.

Online social networking sites such as Facebook.com have also contributed to the college yearbook’s decline, Wood said.

“It provides some of the same sense of community,” he said.

At MU, the student government pulled the Savitar’s funding late last year, eliminating a 65-cent surcharge collected from undergraduates as part of their student fees.

The Savitar has struggled in recent years, said yearbook adviser Becky Diehl, reducing production costs and quality the past two years by publishing a smaller, magazine-style handout offered free to graduating seniors.

“Even then, we really had a hard time getting seniors to pick it up,” she said.

With nearly 30,000 students on campus, the Savitar had only sold 300 to 400 copies annually before the short-lived switch to a magazine format.

“It’s difficult for people to understand when they’re graduating that they’re going to want to look back in 30 years,” Sokoloff said.

He hopes the Web version, now in its second month, will preserve the Savitar’s original intent while adapting to the times.

“What’s the purpose of the yearbook? It’s being able to come back and understand what was life like on campus,” Sokoloff said. “I think that’s what we’re accomplishing. We’re just doing it in a little bit different process.”

But while Facebook, online digital photos and other innovations are helping to personalize the college experience, the rapid changes in technology may be no match for the old-fashioned permanence of a bound, hardcover volume, Wood said.

“It stays on the shelf forever,” he said. “It’s not going to crash if you have the wrong software.”