This post was published in The Wilson Times July 30, 2020
I was wrong.
A dozen years ago, I was an editor at this newspaper, which, like every newspaper in the country, was reeling from a tidal wave of changes in the news and advertising industries. Publishers, accustomed to what executives in other industries would consider phenomenal profit margins, were facing a future in which the paper’s primary source of revenue was abandoning print.
Publishers everywhere were trying to find a way to make ends meet. It would not be easy. Classified advertising, the reliable gold mine of newspapers, was falling off a cliff, pushed over the edge by an existential change in how people sold items, sought workers for job vacancies, bought things and sold houses and land, by upstarts such as eBay, Craig’s List, Facebook, Google and other new and unexpected competitors. Newspapers were fighting for their lives.
One subset of this anxiety-filled debate was over obituaries. For all of my newspaper career up to that time, obituaries had been an afterthought. At a weekly newspaper I edited in the1970s, the funeral home down the street would walk its obituaries directly to the newspaper. When I arrived in Wilson, the newspaper used a lower-echelon employee to handle obits. Until fax machines and email came along, obits were taken by telephone; calls could be difficult, even coming from a trusted local funeral home or an upset survivor.
That procedure had to be modified, a story I’ll get to in a moment.
The debate that affected every division of the newspaper was about whether to charge for obituaries. Most newspapers had begun to charge for obits in the same way they charged for classified advertising, by the inch. It seemed to be the way the industry was going. It was “clean” in that newspapers billed the funeral home, not the grieving family. The cost was generally passed along to the family by the funeral home, becoming a relatively small addition to the funeral costs. One eastern N.C. publisher who had made the leap to paid obituaries called it “low-hanging fruit.”
My argument was that obituaries were among the most important news in the paper each day. The audience for a particular obituary might be narrow, but it is passionate. Obituaries are clipped and saved. They are read over and over. They are precious beyond words.
Ultimately, my argument lost. The necessity of operating revenue to stay alive exceeded my “principled” insistence of serving the reader with all the news.
What I never anticipated was that the change to paid obits made the obituary pages much more interesting. When treating obits as news, we had an obligation to treat everyone the same, limit the length of obits and to decide whether grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, etc. would be listed by name.
In the new era of paid obituaries, some obits run two full columns (several hundred words) or more. And some are written very entertainingly. An obit in the Raleigh N&O a decade ago made national news with its snarky, rambling final last word in a really cutthroat sibling rivalry. The sibling paying for the obit got the last, insulting word.
The other story mentioned above: In the old days of obits as news, a man stormed into the newsroom one day to complain that he was not dead, despite an obit that said he died in a traffic accident several counties away. We had credulously taken the obit as provided via telephone by an out-of-town funeral home. He threatened to sue. A call to our lawyers assured us that saying someone is dead when he’s not is not libelous.
But how did the error happen? It turns out, according to law enforcement sources, that the alleged deceased had called in his own obit, identifying himself as a family spokesman. He allegedly faked his traffic accident death because his ex-wife had not been sufficiently upset when he really was injured in an earlier accident. He allegedly made up the fatality to give her reason to mourn. His threatened lawsuit over his obit was never filed.
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