RIP to one of our own, one of our best -- Craig Stanke

Anyone handling the obit needs to treat it like it were their own mother, father, brother, sister, child, so on.

This is the ultimate violation of trust that a newspaper can still take care of the basics. Hard to imagine anything less professional.

 

Obits, like newspapers, used to be considered a sacred trust. Now they are not, and it's hard to win back customers when you screw up obits because you undervalue their importance.

 

I don't know how they do it in Fort Laud, but my paper long since lost editorial control of the paid obits. We just ensure that all of them on the list get in uncut, no matter how much news hole gets eaten, and we check the spelling on the names in the heds, but that's about it. If they are not on the list, we don't know about them. It may not be newsroom people who messed this up. Not that it makes this a whole lot better for the loved ones.

I was on one of the papers that were among the first wave to charge for obits, and the whole idea horrified me. It seemed to me just good PR to give it away (although we always charged for "death notices).

When Craig's mom died a year ago, I sent condolences and said when my dad (a newspaper advertising guy) died, my mom didn't realize that newspapers now charge for obits and she wrote half a book about him. She was shocked by how much it would cost. So I sat at the table in the funeral parlor and edited down what she wrote about my dad until we got to what she wanted to spend. I told her, don't worry, I am good at this and you won't even notice what's missing. But it was not a pleasant 10 minutes.

Craig's response was, "Ours was about 20 inches of agate type, and I told several people: You don't know editing pressure until you're editing an obit about your mom, written by your sister."

 

Writing a loved one's obit might be the most loving act you can do for that person.

You'll never be prouder of a piece of copy (especially one with no byline, or pay).

RIP Craig. It will all come out in the wash. Still a shitty thing on top of an already shitty deal.

 

Krissy found someone helpful in the Chicago office today. The obituary will run in the Sun-Sentinel tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday. It's done. We'll put our energies back to celebrating Craig's life.

 

Most every paper I worked at, you could take a dump in the publisher's office and be in less trouble than you would by screwing up an obit. Those were the golden calves, not to be questioned or altered in any way. If it came in with every third letter capitalized, by God that's how it ran. Unreal.

 

wonderful. guess it's as happy a ending as we could hope regarding craig/sf's passing. can't help but think (hope) he's found some humor in this, an irony that perhaps cn someday comfort his incredible family.

and it's so great to know amy, krissy and the rest know of this place, and sf's place here, and the respect and fondness everyone -- EVERYONE -- had for craig.

 

Obituairies are becoming another unintended victim of the compression in our business. So many community papers going belly-up, and the alternative from the big city isn't better. My grandmother lived most of her life in the mid-SF Peninsula, but was shifted to a long-term care faciltity in the Monterey Bay area in order to be closer to my mother. When she passed, there wasn't a paper that served her old hometown any more (there may be weeklies, I don't know. Mom certainly didn't) and what the SF Chronicle was charging was more than mom wanted to pay. So mom just ran it in a paper in her region.

 

SF_Express would love that we've turned this into a serious journalism discussion.

 

Obits remain a money machine (big-city rates are beyond insane), because the papers think they hold the gun under the circumstances . . . and they're absolutely right.

 

The inevitable, these days . . . establishing what's essentially a protection racket, then taking the money for granted. Classless.

 

I was telling a non-journalism friend about SF and noted that because most people don't write letters anymore, it's unusual for me to have a backlog of meaningful correspondence with anyone, but I do in this instance in the form of PMs. (I hope I never get some kind of old-person's memory impairment, because my non-internet friends and family will be out of luck, as my relationships with them are stored nowhere but in my brain. Never been much of a photos person.) The PMs from SF and a few others are a gift that I didn't recognize until now. Anyone know if there's an easy way to save PMs besides cutting and pasting one by one into a Word document?

I suppose I now will make an effort to at least write a little more on greeting cards to my family and other people I care about. I doubt in some cases I can reverse a societal tilt from phone calls and texting and clicking "Like" on FB to actual letters in stamped envelopes, but I'll do what I can to engage them with the written word. I guess it's up to them if they save the stuff.