RIP Renay

[TigerVols]

https://www.fayobserver.com/obituaries/m0028451

 

[wicked]

Fantastic!

Although if the son paid by the word or inch, he was out a lot of money.

 

[swingline]

Two thumbs up.

 

[tapintoamerica]

Fantastic!

Although if the son paid by the word or inch, he was out a lot of money.

Thousands.
That can’t be real, can it? That’s to win some kind of award.

 

[wicked]

I saw an obit once that had to be 50 inches, no lie. And the deceased’s ties to the area were flimsy, I think it was where her surviving husband was from. It probably paid the salaries for everyone on the copy desk for a week.

 

[User 150927]

So wonderful.

 

[ChrisLong]

I got "educated" on the newspaper obit business recently. I guess it is one of the last things available for newspapers to gouge their customers.

My friend's wife died unexpectedly in October. I told him I would handle the obit for him because I'm still friends with the guy running the show where I used to work. I wrote about a 10 inch obit, submitted with a color photo. One day was $1,100. That's what I got. Two days would have been $1,800 and included a third day free. Oh, and they send you a plaque.

My daughter's boyfriend works at 3 weeklies, including the one in the city where my friend lives. We put the same obit in those papers. Cost was $600. His employee discount reduced it to $500.

Shouldn't obits be free?

 

[wicked]

Ship sailed a long time ago.

My dad died about eight years ago. Were it not for my old employer’s policy on free death notices for employees’ families, the death notices alone would’ve been about 10 percent of the cost for the funeral/wake. (He was cremated, so that brought costs down.)

 

[Starman]

The battle over paid vs. free obits occupies much of my early small-town 5/6-day daily journalism career in the Eighties/early Nineties.
I started as SE at a 6-day daily where obits were free, and ran "substantially intact," that is, we ran whatever the funeral home gave us, but we did edit for grammar, spelling, blatant libel and other legal liability reasons.
Although not usually for length. Some of those free obits went on and on and on.

I remember it was a huge issue that we were very firm about using the factual statement "died" as opposed to " went to live in the light of the Lord," etc etc yadda yadda. That pissed some people off big time.

During my tenure there, it became an issue that funeral directors were charging as a non-optional part of the standard funeral package, a fairly significant sum (I think it was $400-500) for "publicity and publications."

Our publisher contended that given that reality, there was no reason newspapers should not charge for obits.
So we went to a flat rate of $50 for starters, which immediately raised the howls of the funeral homes.

 

[Octave]

Handle those like you're handling your own mama's, is how I was trained. And so I did. I had more anxiety over the obits than anything else that was in my bucket.

 

[tapintoamerica]

The battle over paid vs. free obits occupies much of my early small-town 5/6-day daily journalism career in the Eighties/early Nineties.
I started as SE at a 6-day daily where obits were free, and ran "substantially intact," that is, we ran whatever the funeral home gave us, but we did edit for grammar, spelling, blatant libel and other legal liability reasons.
Although not usually for length. Some of those free obits went on and on and on.

I remember it was a huge issue that we were very firm about using the factual statement "died" as opposed to " went to live in the light of the Lord," etc etc yadda yadda. That pissed some people off big time.

During my tenure there, it became an issue that funeral directors were charging as a non-optional part of the standard funeral package, a fairly significant sum (I think it was $400-500) for "publicity and publications."

Our publisher contended that given that reality, there was no reason newspapers should not charge for obits.
So we went to a flat rate of $50 for starters, which immediately raised the howls of the funeral homes.

If someone pays for an obit and the item effectively becomes an advertisement, does that mitigate liability for false and defamatory claims?

 

[Starman]

If someone pays for an obit and the item effectively becomes an advertisement, does that mitigate liability for false and defamatory claims?

Just about the time I left there, they flipped totally to paid obits, and the policy was they were given a word limit and after that the obits were supposed to run verbatim.

They ran a disclaimer line: "Obituaries are run as they are received from funeral homes. The Daily Grunt assumes no responsibility for content."

 

[dixiehack]

Reading the obituaries that we were not allowed to edit in any way was my first inkling that barbarian rule would soon come to pass.

 

[Bud_Bundy]

I worked in a city about 800 miles from where I grew up. My parents visited a few times, but that's all. When my dad died, I was at the funeral home in my hometown making arrangements and the funeral director mentioned that my newspaper called, wondering if I wanted to put his obituary in the paper 800 miles away. Oh, they would give my a 20 percent discount because I worked there. No thanks.

When I was a young pup and worked at the weekly newspaper in my hometown, I got to type up wedding announcements usually submitted by the bride's family ... "The bride wore a taffeta scoop-neck gown, blah, blah, blah." I told the editor that if I ever got married, I was going to submit an announcement all about what I wore ("The groom wore a rented tuxedo from Men's Wearhouse") and I expected it to be printed word for word in payback. He and I had a good laugh about it, but by the time I did get married, he was in the great newsroom in the sky and I never even though about it until 3 or 4 months later.

 

[Octave]

A paper I worked told me they would run my dad's obit for free. It was an unexpected act of kindness, maybe the best I received in newspapers.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

At the last newspaper I paginated at, they laid out obits in a separate program that I imported as a PDF when it was done. More times than not, the dimensions were never a match (page was too long or the obit person didn't account for an ad.) Needless to say, I became an expert at scaling and at cutting-and-pasting.

 

[apeman33]

When we began charging, we were told that our rates were cheap compared to other papers around us. The Kansas City Star supposedly charged $500 regardless of length.

We would print a "death notice" (basic info: name, age, where and when died, immediate family) for free. Obituaries were initially $30. After a while, we decided that if anything was longer than 500 words, it would be $60.

Photo included.

I don't know what the rates are now since I've been gone, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've been raised.

 

[I Should Coco]

The battle over paid vs. free obits occupies much of my early small-town 5/6-day daily journalism career in the Eighties/early Nineties.
I started as SE at a 6-day daily where obits were free, and ran "substantially intact," that is, we ran whatever the funeral home gave us, but we did edit for grammar, spelling, blatant libel and other legal liability reasons.
Although not usually for length. Some of those free obits went on and on and on.

I remember it was a huge issue that we were very firm about using the factual statement "died" as opposed to " went to live in the light of the Lord," etc etc yadda yadda. That pissed some people off big time.

During my tenure there, it became an issue that funeral directors were charging as a non-optional part of the standard funeral package, a fairly significant sum (I think it was $400-500) for "publicity and publications."

Our publisher contended that given that reality, there was no reason newspapers should not charge for obits.
So we went to a flat rate of $50 for starters, which immediately raised the howls of the funeral homes.

1. The no-holds-barred street brawl between rival TV news crews in “Anchorman” really could have been between copy editors and funeral home owners. Lots of hatred between those two groups.

2. My former shop let any flowery substitute for “died” go in obits, since they were paid. A memorable one said a woman “joined God’s heavenly choir … even though she was a poor singer.”

3. One time the publisher joined our daily news meeting, complaining about the huge number of election letters to the editor that ran in our paper. “We should charge people to run those, just like we do for obituaries,” he said. “What do you guys think?”
I replied that obituaries should be free, too.
“Where do you find guys like this?” the publisher asked my boss, the managing editor.

 

[Starman]

My dad died in 2001 at 75. He had retired four months earlier from part-time copy desk duty at the midsize daily where he worked for 45+ years. (He had retired from full time duty at age 70, but kept working 2-3 days a week to keep busy and pick up pin money. He finally retired for good when his health entered its final skid.)

We got a 10 percent discount off the flat rate of $200 for the obit. They said the obit would run verbatim except for "obvious errors."

I wrote the obit. No errors. When it ran in the paper, they had deleted a bunch of stuff, including the names of his parents (who had died in the 1970s) and a reference to a stillborn son who died a year before I, the "oldest," was born. PLUS they made several typos in the copy, which had been spotless.
I was ****ing pissed.

The paper I was working at the time offered me a free obit, but he didn't know anybody in the area, so I didn't bother.

He had grown up in the metro Detroit area, so we looked into putting the obit into the Free Press, but I think it was something like $500, so we just ran a death notice. (Pretty sure even that cost $75-100.)

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

He had grown up in the metro Detroit area, so we looked into putting the obit into the Free Press, but I think it was something like $500, so we just ran a death notice. (Pretty sure even that cost $75-100.)

In the local big-city daily, obituaries are news items and death notices are classified ads. You can buy a death notice as long as you want, but an obituary is an editorial element -- no money involved.

I arranged a death notice in 1995 for my uncle in the big-city daily, where I worked. Two lines, $125.

When my folks passed, I wrote their obits for the local small-town daily, which were edited to my dissatisfaction -- but they were free, so I had no complaint.