Other publishers, such as Dominic Welch of the Salt Lake Tribune, say they are making money on obituaries. ![]() It is clear ad space and fees vary widely from paper to paper: from 35 cents a word for information the newsroom wouldn't ordinarily include at Iowa's Cedar Rapids Gazette, to $2 a line after seven free lines at the Charlotte Observer, to $12 an inch at Colorado's Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.Įxecutives at the Des Moines Register say the full page or so of free obits the paper runs every day as a matter of principle could be bringing in "substantial" money, but they say they can't be more specific. ![]() "Newspapers have a long, and I think wonderful, tradition of providing news about deaths and births and marriages, and to convert this into a so-called profit center, I think, is regrettable." He adds, "If you look at the profit margins of the big newspapers, you wonder how they can say they have to do this."įew newspaper heads like to talk specifics about how much money obituaries-and shorter death notices-bring in when papers charge for them. Do you charge for putting important information in the paper? That's absurd."īob Giles, executive director of the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center and former editor and publisher of the Detroit News, agrees. "I just don't understand why it's necessary to wring the last penny out of people. "I think it's awful," says Gil Cranberg, a retired Des Moines Register editorial page editor who now teaches journalism at the University of Iowa. George Wallace's in September, crooner Frank Sinatra's in May.īut for mere mortals, 90 percent of the country's dailies will charge a fee to print news of their deaths, estimated an April 7, 1997, U.S. Blackmun's last month, former Alabama Gov. And almost all dailies still run wire stories on historic deaths, such as retired Supreme Court Justice Harry A. The Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Daily News, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune-all of these, and more, run staff-written reconstructions of the lives of their local prominent who have died. The Los Angeles Times recently increased its full-time obit desk from one writer to three and is stocking up on advance obits. Of course, great national papers such as the New York Times continue to craft mini-biographies of the famous or significant who are newly dead. Despite the proportion of aging readers that has grown with the graying of the general population, many newsrooms treat the deaths of ordinary citizens as the kind of non-news to which the request for coverage gets a polite version of "you'll have to buy an ad." ![]() Many budget-conscious dailies say they no longer have the staff or space for complimentary obituaries of non-newsworthy folks. And it may be sales clerks, not news clerks, who write up the brief details of a person's life and death, charging by the line. Destined to be clipped and tucked into family Bibles or sent off to insurance offices to prove that a soul had passed on, they were often a newspaper's doff of the hat to a departed subscriber.īut now the friendly local obit writer is more likely to work in the classified ad department than in the newsroom. Once, obituaries were uniquely the products of newsrooms, summaries of ordinary lives and deaths that tested the accuracy of cub reporters and the patience of news clerks. Policies Blumberg abhors in Montana have found their way into newspapers around the country. "The death of a citizen in a newspaper's circulation area is not only news, it's important news." Newspapers, he says, should not be putting the interests of their shareholders "above the interests of the subscribers." "They're ghouls," he says, remembering looking up the definition of the term ("evil spirits that feed on the dead") before using it in this context. But he is particularly withering on one movement he believes those chains began encouraging about eight years ago: requiring payment to publish news of the dead. The Treasure State Review, an occasional publication the retired dean of the University of Montana journalism school writes and mails from Big Fork, blasts away fearlessly at the out-of-state chains that now own all but two dailies in his state. N OBODY COULD ACCUSE Nathaniel Blumberg of being reticent. Judith Sheppard teaches journalism at Auburn University. With profit margins so high, do they really have to? More and more newspapers are charging for obituaries.
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