Free State High School students Erica Smith, left, and Ashleigh Ward collaborate at a computer work station while designing pages and editing photographs for the Talon yearbook.

Facebook lets people tell their friends how much they mean to them every day. It lets friends post and comment on photos. It facilitates inside jokes and helps people meet new friends. It records the passing of the year day by day, minute by minute.

So how can a high school yearbook compete with Facebook?

“When Facebook has been bought out and morphed into some other enterprise, the hardcover yearbook will still be there,” says Laurie Folsom, journalism adviser for Free State High School. “Yearbooks are forever. They capture a moment in time and hold it until the reader is ready to revisit the past.”

Jenna Passio, Free State senior and managing editor for the Talon, the school’s yearbook, says she doesn’t fear the Facebook propaganda either.

“It wasn’t too long ago that people used MySpace more than Facebook,” she says. “Who knows how long it will be until people stop using Facebook?”

Passio says the staff has used photos from students’ summer vacations found on Facebook to add to the yearbook’s coverage.

Still, rather than rejecting the digital age to stay rooted in tradition, most yearbook staffs are embracing the opportunities technology provides to make the tradition even better.

“The introduction of technology and online tools has made it much easier for yearbook staffs to create a yearbook, freeing them up to focus more time on content and producing that inclusive yearbook,” says Rich Stoebe, director of communications for Jostens. Jostens is a nationwide yearbook publishing company.

Stoebe and Julie Fitzgerald, Jostens director of yearbook marketing, say the Internet and social networking sites have become important marketing tools for yearbooks.

In recent years, the company has embarked on new programs to expose students to the business side of a creative product and help them use the Internet to their advantage.

One of Jostens’ programs provides a free, online photo database that allows parents and students to upload and submit photos for the yearbook.

“The program makes the yearbook more inclusive,” Fitzgerald says. “Students feel better because they know the content and feel like they’re adding to the story.”

She says yearbooks would continue to blend with online features, but that the printed yearbook wouldn’t go away.

“The yearbook is really the only product that the school can hold up as a representative of their school and their school’s culture,” Fitzgerald says. “The yearbook is a shared experienced that doesn’t lend itself to some of those technologies as well as the printed book.”

And students’ sustained interest for the yearbook shows.

In the past year, Folsom’s yearbook staff has grown from 12 students to 20. The yearbook became a full-color book two years ago — a growing trend as technology has improved to print color faster and cheaper.

The Talon also has a Web site, and the yearbook class continues to upgrade to the latest programs and technologies.

However, both Folsom and Heather Lawrenz, Lawrence High School’s journalism adviser, say yearbook sales are down by about 50 books per year. They says ad sales are down, too.

Folsom and Lawrenz attribute the decreases to the economy and fewer students as opposed to a reflection of people being less interested in yearbooks.

Folsom says she could see the yearbook becoming a digital book on Kindle or Sony eBooks before it became an online entity, but Lawrenz says she didn’t think yearbooks would change that much over time.

“At the end of the day, we’re here to train kids on how to run a business, how to be good writers, be good photographers, be strong designers,” Lawrenz says. “You can do that in a lot of different ways. There will still be a place for yearbooks. You might have to change the makeup a little bit, but it’ll still have a place.”