Obscene Obituary Rates

My condolences Dan.

When I worked at a small-town paper (late 90s), we were M-F afternoons and Saturday morning. No Sunday paper. On Friday night, my deadline to finish the sports section for the Saturday a.m. was midnight.

At around 9 p.m., a funeral director calls and wants to get an obit in because the funeral was Sunday. For some reason, I ended up taking the call. Funeral director kept demanding to know when our presses started rolling, and after I finally told him, said that we could get the obit in. I kept explaining to him that the obit pages were already done during the daytime, that the community editor who did them had gone home, that if we did put the obit in, that meant we had to type it up, redesign the page, repaste it on boards, send it to production for re-setting, and have them do more work. I told him the process wasn’t as simple as he described.

And the funereal director said: “But you have a midnight deadline. You have three hours to get this in.”

Me: “Yes, for the sports section, which I have to do myself. I don’t have time to redo the obits page and get the sports section done at the same time. The obits page is already done. Do you want the obit to run in the sports section?”

The funeral home director demanded I give up the home phone numbers for the publisher, editor and the ad director, which I refused. He told me he would call them Monday morning and that I would be in”big trouble.” Hung up.

Monday morning, I told my editor what happened. He shrugged and said they’d had problems with the guy before.

 

You know, this is actually a good thread.....

Okay, here's my best day as an obituary/tribute writer.

During football season, my role is the "stay behind guy." Saves money, allows me to get other stuff done and even helps because I can get what we call the "0:00 gamer" (breaking, news now, whatever) up while the boss is handling all his duties before catching the charter back home, when he'll post his stuff.

This one Friday, one of of our former players, Willie "Foots" Lee died of a heart attack. His son Xavier Lee was a Florida State QB.

Our AD loved the guy and my boss said the death was hitting him hard.

"Tell him I got this."

First thing, call my FSU colleagues and keep them in the loop. Second, call the local columnist. Third, for some reason Xavier is a facebook friend, reach out to him.

I do the research and it's actually fun -- Newspapers.com donated a subscription and I utilize it a lot. It's cool to see bylines of colleagues from the 70s. (Larry Guest is almost tolerable during this time period) and I crank out a respectable piece.

The AD adds his quote and goes 'Beautiful."

I send it to Xavier. "Wow. You do not know how much this story means to me and the family."

I shared the rough draft with the local columnist so he could do his story. He bounced back "you have to have this one thing wrong -- the school you have listed as his high school desegregated and was a middle school at that time." Well, I had the newspaper clippings of his wedding announcement that included he did graduate from that HS when it was still segregated and a second clip about his tour of Vietnam in the e-mail ready to go, but come on...if I can tell you his only NFL touchdown came on a 10-yard fumble return in the 4th quarter of a 34-20 loss to the Houston Oilers on November 27, 1977, don't you think I can get his high school right? BOOM! The local columnist is a good guy -- his follow column crushed it.

Later in the day when I had moved on to somethings, the phone rings with a call from 850 area code. It's my FSU colleagues. He said he loved the story. Then he goes "I just got out of Jimbo's office, he wanted to know if you know anything else."

"Fisher?" I replied. "Jimbo Fisher wants to know what I know?"

(Resist all desires to say something about that offensive line..)

"Does this make me a Seminole?" was all I could come up with.

I really felt good that day.

 

Obits, or lack thereof, have been a sore point with me for a long time. I get angry when I find out 6 months later that someone I knew died, someone whose funeral I definitely would have attended. This stuff should be in the newspaper, but they just don't want to do them.

I did not get upset when the hometown papers did nothing after my Dad died. It was important to me, but not them. I mean, he only lived in this town for 70 years. He was a store manager, no big deal. Two of the local papers I called said they didn't have anybody to write them. OK.

But recently, this one angered me. My friend's Dad died. He lived in our town since 1965. His kids all went through the public schools system. He was a very prominent law professor at UCLA. He was a nationally recognized expert in Constitutional Law, whose opinions were used in more than a dozen Supreme Court rulings. Among his close friends were Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She wanted to attend a memorial event at UCLA, but security concerns prevented it. Instead, she recorded a video tribute that was played at the memorial.

There are six "newspapers" in town -- one daily, one online (the only one that doesn't print), and four weeklies. All of them have online presence. I notified them all. UCLA's law PR people notified them, sending a written obit and photo. The only one to run anything was the online publication. The other five, nothing, nada, zilch.

 

The paper I left in December takes obituaries written by funeral homes and cleans them up. That's it. It posts all of them online when they receive them so that people don't have to wait until Wednesday or Saturday to see them.

I'm pretty sure the local funeral homes only send obits to the paper if asked to do so since both of them also put them on their own websites. They really don't need the paper.

 

It is truly sad that you have a better chance of getting mentioned for free in most local papers if you get killed by accident than for any accomplishments.

 

I told this story on here years ago, but one of my better moments in journalism was in my first year at a small-town weekly. And I didn't even write anything.

My paper had a local minister who, for decades, would write a column each week. He’d talk about God, but he wasn’t a fire and brimstone guy. Mostly, he’d write about how God wanted people to live good and kind lives. I’d never met him or anything; he’d just mail his column in.

Then one day, word came out that the minister died. I kinda wondered what we would run that week in the space (no wire copy, we were all locally generated). Then the idea hit me that maybe it would be cool if we could find his first column from decades earlier and run it. I didn’t tell anyone, just wandered down to my little bureau’s office cellar, where we kept archives (in a loose sense, mostly binders of papers scattered around the floor.)

It took me a couple of hours, but I found the minister’s first column from 40+ years early. Called my editor and my publisher, both of whom thought it was an awesome idea. Instead of running the column in the usual spot, they ran it in place of the editorial, with a note at the top indicating that the minister died.

The day after it ran, the minister’s wife called me to thank me for running it and told me how her husband loved writing the column and that my finding his first column was the perfect tribute. It got a little dusty in my office with the thought that this woman, who had just lost her husband, would take the time to call me. And a few days later, their daughter also wrote me a nice thank you note.

A proud moment from a sad situation.

 

It's disgraceful and yet do the suits care?? Frick NO! This all adds up, but the obit policies of newspapers, abysmal delivery and the dregs of all salespeople are huge reasons newspapers are dead. It's not the hard-working reporters who normally get blamed by the suits.

 

1. If you're famous/notorious, the NYT will give you 800 wds for free, w/a photo.
2. What do newspapers charge for birth announcements? It's a real question, I have no idea.

 

I can’t remember the last time I saw a birth announcement in a paper.

 

Wrote my dad's obituary last November, it ran in three papers, not sure what they charged. Probably too much, but I did hear from a lot of people who only learned of his passing in the local weekly (they'd moved to Florida 17 years before). So people still do read obits.

It was an extremely hard story to write, especially since it was written (and revised several times) the day he died. But upon re-reading it several times over the past nine months I'm pretty proud of how it came out.

I'm also glad our family could convey what we wanted to say so it wasn't a boilerplate, funeral-home story. I'd recommend any writers here write their loved one's obits, if possible. It sounds odd to say so, but it was a very satisfying and meaningful experience.

 

I’m from northern New Jersey. My mom died last year. Funeral web site was free with photo. Star-Ledger wanted $550. Gotta make money where they can I guess

 

The paper I left did this:
* Basic announcement — kid and parents' names, date and time of birth: free.
* $5 announcement — kid, parents' and grandparents' names, date and time of birth, length and weight, names of siblings, which hospital they were born at. Photo optional, no extra charge for it.