RIP Renay

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

 

Fantastic!

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

 

Two thumbs up.

 

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

 

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.

 

So wonderful.

 

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?

 

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.)

 

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.

 

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.

 

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."