Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Death Notices May Be a Dying Business
Hugh Pickens writes "Alan D. Mutter writes in his journalism blog 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' that some newspapers exploit bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices — a distasteful and strategically inept way for them to try to make ends meet. 'I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in ... the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice,' writes Mutter. But lose the death notice business, and newspapers risk losing a huge audience driver as well. The solution may be partnering with websites like Legacy.com, a site that already publishes death notices for about two-thirds of the people who die each day in the US. 'It may not be easy to figure out the terms of a broader collaboration, writes Rich Gordon on Poynter.org, 'partly because some newspaper executives are wary of Legacy and feel the company could become a competitive threat for audiences and revenue. But this is exactly the reaction many newspaper executives had to collaborating with Internet companies in other classified advertising categories. I'd hate to see newspapers make the same mistake with death notices and obituaries.'"
Every respectful person is sure to twitter his or her death as it's happening.
Really? That many people read the newspaper just to find out who died recently? I don't doubt that people do it, but are there really that many of them?
What the hell is a "relection"?
"...which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice"
I'm sure a web site would be more than happy to take over their business for, let's say, $45 a day for listing 1820 words, and the web site will still make money at it.
I only believe death notices from Netcraft.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
There is nothing cheap in San Fran other than Chinese food.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Why in the world would someone publish a death notice in the first place? Is it some sort of legal requirement? If not, I don't understand the thought processes that would lead someone to want to do such a thing.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
If we assume an average of 5 letters per word, that makes 0.5 USD/letter --- I'll no longer think that my SMS plan at 0.1 cents/letter is expensive...
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Legacy.com sucks because their obits are only available for a month or two, and then they extract a fee to see the obit. Legacy is a black hole where information goes down the drain. I suppose it's possible all the newspapers themselves are black holes also because when then go out of business their websites will disappear and all that information will go "poof" and be gone forever. A real problem looming, and obits are just the tip of the iceberg.
I think posting on the net would be an almost nerdly requirement for slashdotters. "And his services will be held in his home town and on IRC where his computer still has him logged in, even if he hasn't said anything since 1998"
Many print newspapers carry "legal notices", of D/B/A names, incorporations, and such. As non-searchable information, that's almost useless. But it's a big profit center for many newspapers, which are fighting to keep it.(Google cache of Michigan Press Association, whose web site is down)
On the other hand, if governments don't require that information to be published, they should maintain the database (which they will have anyway for internal purposes) and offer free access. D/B/A names in the United States are handled at the county level, and that data can be hard to obtain on line. There are commercial services that collect it, expensively. Considering that the amount of data is small by modern standards (all the data for the US will fit on a DVD), it's not a high-cost item.
A non-obvious business opportunity. Until fine minutes ago.
if they are not in the paper they then continue on their day
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
thus decreasing the cost.
Something like this: Bozo Mortuary Services: We put "Fun" back to Funerals.
Ever looked at an obit page in a real physical paper? They're full of ads for elderly medical products, retirement communities, etc.
Most papers have more taste than to advertise funeral homes on the same page, but they're definitely taking advantage of this.
SF is largely transient. It isn't made up of longstanding communities anymore. Neighborhoods, yes. Communities, not so much. It's largely a young person's town, and most of the young people who live in SF aren't from there. No different than NYC (or any other large, attractive city), I guess.
I think the only places where tightly knit communities would still want that sort of service are mostly small towns, where families and friends still actually commune together. Most suburbs aren't that sort of community either - they're places people go to sleep after working too many hours in another suburb or city.
Am I the only one who initially misread the article title as being the obituary for newspapers? Stuff like this only serves to reinforce the expectation that printed newspapers are an endangered species. I wonder when the bailout will happen?
linquendum tondere
As I see it, this post is a publicity of legacy.com!!
The title announces a story about a dying habit (obituaries). But instead it says you can publish yours much cheaper in legacy.com.
Slashdot, what happened!
I thought social network sites are/will be a good solution for this. You don't even have to know the password of the dead one to query his/her friends. (But I guess you could get even the password if you prove the site owners that you're the closest relative of the dead one.)
I would love it when someone would call in with a death notice or an obituary since I knew it would probably be long winded and we charged by the line and by the section the "ad" would run in. Those prayers that people publish from time to time were great too. I loved those 30 line prayers to saint whoever for whatever blessings they were going for.
My wife already knows that there's no reason to publish anything about me when I die. The important people will know about it already and the rest don't need to know.
When my wife's father died I got on the phone to try and get her a ticket from Atlanta to Baltimore. At the time I found tickets from $700 - $900 for a same day flight. When I mentioned to one of the airlines the reason for such a sudden need they told me they had a bereavement rate and quoted me $1100. I've not flown with that line since.
Too many lies and too many dead trees. Their own doing -- publishing distorted "facts", servicing minorities in control, misleading the population. Newspapers were always un-elected powers. Rest in peace, let everyone say what they think, and let the trees live on.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/29/193234/A-Geek-Funeral Then 1/4 million views later... http://www.flickr.com/photos/26445696@N04/3961372594/ everyone knows he passed away. As an added benefit this gives you geek street cred in the afterlife since he's now the top Google response for searchs like "computer urn" or "Geek Funeral" and will probably hold that position for some time.
Linux -- the Ultimate Windows Service Pack
The "market share" for obits and death notices has been shifting to the web for years. This was initially driven by families who disliked the strict formats of newspaper obituaries and wanted to add personal touches to obits. Newspaper have tightly standardized formats for obits, largely to impose discipline on the process of compiling them, which is typically done by staffers who are new or low in the reportorial heirarchy. Online remembrance sites offered the opportunity for family members to create more personal obits, and perhaps more importantly, allowed those who knew the deceased to add their comments and memories. As these sites grew in popularity, newspapers started loosening their obit and death notice formats.
... about $300 for two newspapers. Death notices remain essential as a way to notify acquaintances who aren't web-savvy of someone's death and the funeral arrangements. But this was another area where newspapers have missed the Internet opportunity.
Newspapers missed a huge opportunity by not hooking up with someone like Aldor Solutions, which started out making software for funeral directors and later branched out into online remembrance sites and web sites for funeral homes. It turns out the funeral director is the key player in the "death care" business food chain, and Aldor set out to be the technology provider to the funeral directors. I learned about them when I was writing about a dedicated hosting company called Layered Technologies. It turns out some of the principals of Aldor formed LT as the hosting arm of their operations.
A personal experience: I worked for newspapers for 20 years, but was startled by the cost of death notices. Most families have no idea how much these cost because it's often handled by the funeral director and bundled with the larger funeral bill. I handled this personally when a family member passed away, and was just floored at the cost
no, we put another "F" in funeral
Fun fer al
make me immortal. Soon!
Dying is expensive. A wooden casket costs thousands. The cheapest container a funeral home will sell is a "biodegradable urn" for cremation which is basically a cardboard box and it costs around $200. A proper funeral with a church service, burial, grave site, tombstone etc runs into 5 figures.
I live in Finland, one of my parents died some time back and we ended up paying about 700 euro (1000 usd) to run his death notice in two local and small papers (3000 and 7000 readership). Here you also put an ad in the paper for newborns, but what newspapers do is that they charge almost nothing for that since those are considered to draw valuable (=young) readership.
would make death notices obsolete...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence
I wonder if they'll run this in the Obits column?
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
... be sure to wear some Craigslist in your hair.
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I was at a rummage sale looking around, when I spotted a rather spiffy blue briefcase. After purchasing it, I took it home and was loading it with a few things when I noticed a small square of paper. It was the obituary for the person who had owned it before. Talk about creepy.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
I happen to spend two days a week producing death notices. If you would want a reasonable sized notice in a regular dutch newspaper it would cost about 1800 dollar.
Also, it's really not a dying business, not in my country at least (and we do have a fairly high ratio of broadband penetration here). I would estimate around 30% of dead people get a death notice published.
The newspapers are dying in it's today's form, not just the death notice market. I know that it will not happen tomorrow nor in the next 5 years, but it will eventually, as more and more people reads the news on the Internet. And the question here is not just the price (zero x something), but timing. In the past, you would need to wait until the next day to read about some big news in depth, as TV news tend to be just a highlight of the situation. But now? 5 minutes after anything happens you can track the news almost in real time, and not only in your local news sources, but around the world.
The fact is that the Internet is changing every single thing we do, but impacted more extensively in printed materials. The news, the media, the classified ads, the yellow pages, the way we search for restaurants, etc. This is a good thing for sure, but in the process entire businesses will die, people will be unemployed and entire professions will be obsolete, like it happened in the past with cobblers, typewriter repairmen, etc. And then new professions will flourish, and the ones that adapt will be back in the marketing. More of the same, but this time in a much bigger scale.
--- Illogical Spock
How many people read the death notices in the paper? I'm guessing very few. So what is the point of paying for it?
Print many thousands of your own newspapers and have 4 pages to talk about that person and their death or life http://www.makemynewspaper.com/
...but isn't doing the obvious thing: running an ad-supported site on which obits can be posted for free.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The exploitation of grieving survivors is how funeral homes stay in business. $9k coffin? $2k floral arrangements? It's ridiculous. They know that people want to express their love and affection for the dead and convince them that they only way they can do that is to spend money on a bunch of expensive bullshit.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'm 30, and while I don't expect on dying soon, if I did the best way to get the word out would be through Facebook. Sure one of my relatives could put an obit in the newspaper, but most of my friends would find out much faster and more efficiently if they got a notice of my passing-away as a status update. Even people that might not be connected to me directly would likely find out pretty quickly through those that were without too much extra effort. Sure that probably wouldn't work for a lot of people in older age groups, but if the trend is for more and more people to use social networking we might as well use those outlets to spread news that is worthwhile instead of constant updates of trivial information.
http://www.xkcd.com/686/
The Dodo bird was a large pigeon that could not fly. When faced with predation and competition from other more versatile species that were not protected by island isolation, they became extinct. Newspapers as we knew them are media Dodos. Because they cannot fly to escape their predators, they will be overrun. I'm an old fart and still like reading stuff on paper. But I realize that this is an inefficient means of distributing information. My nostalgia does not prevent the inevitable extinction of the media sources that refuse to adapt. I still like reading a book in front of the fireplace, but my romantic notions won't forestall the demise of those that will not adapt.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
So Manny dies - Sarah rings the Golders Green Chronicle and says "My husband just passed away, how much do you charge for a Death Notice"
"Ten pounds per word." comes the reply.
"A little steep," says Sarah, "but at times like these it can't be helped - just write 'Manny's Dead'"
"Sorry madam, but we have a fifty pound minimum charge"
"Hmmm...Ok, well could you put 'Manny's Dead. Volvo for Sale.'?"
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Here in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the local newspaper publishes plain death notes for free. If you want it adorned or specially formated you have to pay.
Mostly, when my aunt died, everybody was asking where the funeral was, and where to send flowers, we gave them the funeral parlors card, and had a url made up for her passing. It was an obituary for her, with a sign in book for comments, and all the info needed for
sending flowers or joining in for her funeral. This was all included in the service fee for the funeral, and I believe it is now common practice. So why would anyone have to spend even more money to let the press know what the family needs to know.
The newspapers need to understand their time has passed, they just keep adding to bringing down the trees, otherwise the radio, net or tv is where i get my news....why waste paper like that?
... for an obit in my experience. Our local paper (pop 230,000) would charge in the order of $2000 for 180 words. $450 would get you an obit roughly three times as long as this post.
Then you died. You know thousands of people face-to-face by name, who'd like to know that you're no longer around.
I was recently involved in a funeral where the death notice cost about $1200 for a few days' publication, for something like 500 words. About 120 people showed up to the funeral, so your acquisition cost is about $10.
It's cold all-around, but a well-attended funeral is very significant for a family, so the market charges what it can afford.
It only notices the locals, though. An old friend of mine died last year and by time somebody thought to get access to his Facebook account, there really wasn't enough time to make a 300-mile trip for a funeral.
Facebook is OK, though, for friends' family members. But not everybody is on Facebook and there's not yet a suitable way to codify one's complete social network and get alerts on it.
It seems inevitable, though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)