(Over) charging for obits

An obit is news.

Pure and simple.

There should be no charge, especially in a smaller paper.

I can see the NYPost charging, but a 50,000 circulation?

 

A death notice is news. If you want all that falderall added in you can pay, at 10K, at a 15K, at a 30K, at a 50K or at a bigger paper. It's a big source of revenue for papers, whether you like it or not 93.

And MU, I'd take Joel's advice and have that cost double checked. It strikes me as odd that the DMN is charging that much more than Fort Worth. A little bit sure, but like 5 times as much? Eyebrow raising to be sure.

 

I'm not talking an 18-inch opus, but the first five inches should be on the house.

Give the immediate relatives, 1-2 quick facts and where you can see them. I think five, maybe six inches should cover it.

 

People die every day. That's news? [/O.J.]

 

I think our basic obits, the unpaid ones, are right around that. Maybe not. The paid ones are the 15-inchers that run with the big photo and that are worded like "Betty Sue Bigguns finally flew home to see her Father, the Lord, on the merciful day of Sunday, April 27..."

 

I'm at a shop much smaller, but ours are free.

 

Wait a minute, your paper produces obits BEFORE the person dies?

you SHOULD charge for that. That's a talent. And let Betty Sue know, too.

 

At our shop, we have free death notices - probably four-five graphs with the bare essentials.

The paid obituaries start at $100 bucks and go up in price the longer they get. We've had some really long ones, with big photos, and I've never heard the Obit lady quote a price over $300. 1500 sounds outrageous.

 

You're thinking of obituaries in the sense of a news story. That's not what's being referred to here. At a lot of places, including my former paper, "obituaries" refers to the paid, submitted copy that is untouchable by the news side, whether it contains copious references to his Lord, Savior and best friend Jesus Christ, or whether it simply contains copious typos. At my previous paper, these were placed by news, and weekend reporters were responsible for typing them in (and, inevitably, screwing them up). Where I am now, they're at least handled by advertising and we couldn't touch them if we wanted to.

We did at one point get approval to clean up the typos in the paid obits. It lasted about three hours, until someone on the ad side realized that removing all the typos would likely shorten the obits and therefore throw off the rates that were being quoted.

 

Wow, and ain't you the heartless wonder.

Dead people are just "product" now, according to you.

Fuck the bereaved, eh? Kick 'em in the teeth while adding to the financial strain of the sudden loss of Mommy.

Good luck with your "product." But you sound like just another one of the management assclowns who forget why readers -- and a newspaper's public image -- are important.

I would rather raise auto dealers' rates, or anything, a trifle more in my town than to make the bereaved cough up more money, at a heartbreaking time in their lives, while making them hear you say that obits now have to fit into your "product" formula -- and if you can't afford it, fuck your beloved dead mommy.

Newspapers used to show heart in the right places. Now they've forgotten how.

I'm appalled and disgusted by paid obits, if you haven't guessed. Plenty of poorer folks lead great lives, and now they can't even get an obit to honor that.

 

And one more thing: If we keep charging for obits, Craigslist and other sites will take over that territory also.

It ain't hard to do. And they can do it.

Obits in papers make it easy for the readers to scan every morning, and they are there in print to clip and save, and send to others also. Lose that reader value -- by charging too much, or anything, or reducing your space for dedicated tributes to the newly deceased in your town -- and you've just lost another market value for your newspaper.

 

I don't think it'd get that bad. Hell, all the obits get published on the various funeral homes' websites as it is, and the newsprint obit biz is still alive. As it were.