The heartless selling of obituaries...

At my first newspaper job, a very small daily, I had to fill in for the obit clerk one day. It was a strange and depressing day. An elderly lady called, livid because some stuff was left out of her husband's obit/death notice. It was an unpaid obit, so we just did the basics: Name, age, family, service info. But she said some of his activity and group involvements were the most important things in his life, and she was furious we would take those out. I felt horrible, because she was so upset, and there was nothing I could do.

I also had a lady call and ask how far in advance an obit would need to be sent in before it would be published. I think I told her something about it's usually the next day as long as it's in my 4 p.m., and that Saturdays and Sundays it was noon or something. She then told me she was just wondering, because the person wasn't actually dead yet. I probably should have asked more questions.

 

My mom reads two things in the paper everyday - the obits and the police reports. Increasingly, both are given short shrift by papers, whether it be by not visiting police stations daily, or making customers now pay for content that regularly drew a lot of eyeballs.

To me, obits always seemed like an easy way to express care for a community. Everyone got a small birth story and a small obit story. The move to charging for obits is one of the biggest decay signs of the industry to me - It probably alienates a shitload of people for short-term, minimal profits. How much goodwill is lost by hitting up families in a time of grief for cash? Does the $50 you get from them outweigh $X in lost circulation and ad revenue as they get disgusted with you doing it?

 

At $100 each, for us anyway, that would average out to more than $250K a year which would go a very long way toward covering the newsroom payroll for the year.

 

Again, my beef isn't with the selling of them per se but at the rates the Projo is charging? $400 for about three inches of copy? In a paper that just one section over is running 800 word AP stories on the US Open? Really? Space is that tight?

Fuck 'em. They won't get my business when I go and, if my family insists, I'll pay for it in advance and made sure that it says "SchiezaInc passed away yesterday but it was still decades after this worthless excuse for a newspaper stopped caring about its readers and died a slow and painful death from the inside first."

 

At a previous stop, I was editing the obits when one started like this: "Joe Schmoe was born in Germany in 19xx. He served in the army during World War II. He came to the United States in 1950 and became a citizen in 1956." I took one look at this, called the receptionist over (an older lady who handled the obits) and asked "Did you see this? This guy was on the other side!"