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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.'"
I'm in my 30's and get the paper around here for just that. Because you do lose touch with friends. In the last 2 years I've had 3 friends die from cancer and one commit suicide. All good friends that I went to school with, it's not just the grey hair folks but those of us who have strong community ties. If I walked downtown, nearly every shopkeeper would greet me by name.
As well, the costs of these things are...insane. My grandfather who was rather well known in the community died 2 years ago. To run his obituary in 3 of the local/nearby community papers ran around $800.
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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.
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.
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Even there, though, it isn't clear that the newspapers aren't completely fucked.
Consider Craigslist vs. Ebay: Ebay wasn't a particularly mortal threat to classifieds(probably didn't help; but didn't seal their doom) because it tried to largely ignore location. That works fine for stuff that is quite valuable per unit weight, or obscure stuff that you can't get just anywhere, so you just have to suck up the shipping, or for stuff that is all shipped anyway, so cutting out the middleman is helpful.
Craigslist, on the other hand, has all the cheapness of being web based; but is explicitly location-centric. And it crushed the classifieds business like a bug(as with most bugs, the crushed remains are still crawling and twitching a bit, bugs are tough motherfuckers; but it is basically game over.)
It wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to build a nationwide; but location-focused obituary mechanism. Once the present crop of old people are finished dying, it is not going to be pretty for the paper obituaries...