Obscene Obituary Rates

I'm sorry, Dan. Sending condolences from us.

 

They don't charge for those monstrosities? Unreal

 

Daytona Dan

My condolences on the loss of your father. My father died in 2014 and I still am trying to come to grips with it. And I had the same experience with my family so we wound up buying an bit for a coupe hundred bucks in the Denver Post, a periodical my father had subscribed to for 47 years.

But the reasons papers are going this is that obituaries are now a big source of revenue. When I hit a town I usually buy the local paper and then count the pages and ads (I am weird). It is rate that I see a paper on weekdays with much more than 8-10 pages of as. Usually the paper will have at least a half page of obits. And they are priced at premium rates. So obits are driving a lot of revenue.

Bit I can tell you that when my Mom died last year we did not buy an obituary in the Post.

 

My first daily was in a retirement community and we could have up to 20 obits each day in the late 80s, early 90s, written by an obituary writer and edited by an editor. And they ran for free.

We started charging the funeral homes $25 to put their logo on the bottom of obits, and they didn't balk, because I think they were charging families to fill out the forms for the free obits.

Now families are paying hundreds or thousands of dollars and writing the obits themselves, often poorly. Nobody edits them and there are often spelling or other errors. It's probably nitpicky stuff that only us journalist will notice -- "Bob worked for Chevy Motors for 30 years" -- but they are sloppy nonetheless.

 

Do newspapers still get the "public notices" money from governments. I'm wondering if social media's growth and newspaper circulation declines make the rules requiring public notification (which newspapers benefitted from) moot. There have been a few dust-ups when a local town's leaders, peeved at the coverage of the dominant local daily would used a small weekly instead.

 

You bet ... newspapers and their state associations pay quite a bit of money on lawyers, who fight tooth and nail to keep those legal notices in the paper.

Obits and legal notices are perhaps the only sources of ad revenue that haven't tanked in the past 10, 15 years.

 

And it's absolutely ridiculous with so many papers having various forms of paywalls - which defeats the purpose of legal/public notices.

 

I just looked back at the email exchanged with the funeral home and local daily from when my mom died in 2015. We ran her obit for two days, and it cost $280 the first day and $171 the second. I guess we got a volume discount?

In my first newspaper job, I worked evenings and took obit calls from funeral home -- before fax and email were things -- and the paper ran them for free. Most of the local daily is behind a paywall, but the (paid) obits are accessible for free as a public service, I presume.

 

The real crime back then was that funeral homes charged for their "obit service" and didn't cut the newspapers in. I don't know if I would go through a newspaper unless the person was over 70 and still might have had friends that read the paper. One of the reasons I make sure to have a wide network of FB friends (school, past jobs, childhood) is to find out about deaths, weddings and other big news.

 

Always like to tell the story that happened to my brother when he was a desker. Once they had to run one obit three or four times, each time correcting a mistake in the previous one. He said someone finally suggested putting a tagline on it, "Joe Jones obit runs Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the Podunk Press."

 

When my dad died many years ago, I lived and worked in a city 800 or so miles away from where he grew up. Nobody in my city knew him, yet when I got to the funeral home in my hometown, the funeral director said he had gotten a call from my paper offering a 20 percent discount if I wanted to put his obituary in my newspaper. Uh, no ....

My father-in-law died a few years back, my brother-in-law and I wrote the obituary and his daughters all had a hand in editing it (you think newspaper editors are tough!), then the funeral home forgot to submit the obit to the newspaper in time. We made full use of social media and good old-fashioned phone calls to alert those who didn't know of his passing. The obit finally ran the day of his funeral, not the day of the visitation like we wanted.