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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.'"
Every respectful person is sure to twitter his or her death as it's happening.
"...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
Yeah, when you get Gray hair, it becomes a popular pastime. Believe it or not, people used to live in things called Communities, and sometimes, they'd recognize a name in the paper, because they Knew People.
I know, I can't believe it either. How wierd.
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.
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.
It may be required for estate or other legal purposes. And, as another poster noted, it's traditional and some people expect it. Didn't realize they were so expensive, but dammnit, dying ain't cheap these days. Nothing is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
if they are not in the paper they then continue on their day
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Let me set the stage for you. You're an old man. Once, you lived in a "neighborhood", which is a place where you know and hang out with people who live and work next door. But as you got older, you moved away, into a retirement or nursing home.
Then you died. You know thousands of people face-to-face by name, who'd like to know that you're no longer around. How does your family let them know? For this generation, the answer is *not* "Facebook".
I swear, the concept of face-to-face friendship is so foreign to young people today, our society is starting to look like Asimov's "The Naked Sun".
But anyway, any business whose primary profit center comes from people who'll be dead in a few years is in trouble.
He's just spending a year or two dead for tax purposes.
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.
I still live in a community - have parties with my neighbors on a regular basis, even. But that doesn't mean I'm going to morbidly look in obituaries every day to see if one of them died - because, you know, I'm actually still *in touch* with my friends, so if one died I'd know about it...I wouldn't need to read about it in the paper.
Nursing homes?
Funeral houses?
Grave diggers?
They seem to be doing fine...
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.)
Your family individually, personally contacts the people they know were close to you. Those people fill in the gaps. No, it's not fun. But it's necessary. I've done it. I'll probably be doing it again in a few years.
If actually know somebody well enough to really care if they've died, it's pretty cold to have to read about it in the newspaper. And it's pretty lazy to use the newspaper as an escape hatch.
The good news is that you can do a lot of it by e-mail. An awful lot of older people use e-mail these days, maybe because they're old and wise enough to realize that correspondence and face to face contact aren't, in fact, mutually exclusive. Maybe they even remember when it was actually hard to travel to see somebody, and you sent, you know, letters...
Anyway, which paper should I publish the notice in, given that all those friends have probably also moved?
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.
Yes
In order to get a passport quickly to fly to a funeral, or to cancel a flight or trip, you often need a clip from a newspaper to proove the death actually happened.
But with everything that happens when someone passes away, it's damn hard to remember everybody and even harder to get ahold of everyone. Especially when you're having to get burial plots, caskets, and all the other stuff that goes on. Especially if the person was highly connected and you had been away for quite some time. I saw it with my mother. She was one of those people who knew a lot of people. I certainly didn't know them all.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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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A coffin can easily cost as much as a car. I had to help pick one out once for a friend.
They had one 'cheapo' model for $995 that was barely a step up from a wooden box. The rest of the 30 coffin models they had ranged from $3995 to $21,995. Only two models were under $5,000 and they only came in white or brown.
Add in the cost for the cement tomb most cemeteries require around a coffin now ($1500), mortuary expenses of $1200 and various other fees for the death certificate and copies, etc...
You feel better to hear the cemetery plot is only about $500 for a 4'x7' piece of land, until you realize thats $777,857 an acre.
Add in the cost of the actual funeral and you can easily spend $15,000 or more just to die.
Flip side - cremation is still a bargain at $525 plus $50 for the death certificate.
There was a time when newspapers ran birth and death announcements for free ... as a community service.
Now they charge?
Its no wonder they are going under, its always good to kick people when their down.
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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."
Most newspapers still run free obituaries as well as paid death notices. But the free versions are generally limited in the types of information contain, and as newspapers have cut back on their size they've also reduced the amount of detail the obits contain. At the newspaper where I work, it's pretty much name, age, where the person lived and when and where the funeral is. (Some of the really big papers have eliminated the free ones altogether).
The paid death notices, on the other hand, function more like classifieds: You can write it any way you want, and you pay by the line or the word.
What most people don't realize, though, is that the funeral homes charge a hefty free even for providing the newspaper with the barebones information for a free obit. And some funeral homes do an appalling job. One major home in my city seems to pick the employee with the most God-awful penmanship to scrawl the information by hand; names are hard to read and details like place names are often misspelled. One of my first newsroom jobs largely consisted of fact-checking the info the funeral homes frequently got wrong (incorrectly putting two t's in "Paterson, NJ," stuff like that). Of course, the papers have pretty much cut all those jobs as well.
...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.
When my mother died last year, I found that running a 2-day notice in the local community paper in the South was $1000. This was a low cost area with a total population less than 5% the size of San Francisco. Shocked by the astonishing price, I estimated what they were taking in annually from death notices, and found that it was probably enough to cover most of their operating expenses.
But there really is no other effective way to get the word out on someone's passing to the community in a timely manner, so the local newspaper has become part of the high-cost for-profit funeral industry, something I had not even suspected.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
Costco sells respectable looking ones for a little under $1,000. Don't know if you have to buy a 3-pack, though.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
The wood for paper is the branches from trees that were already harvested for lumber or are grown like a crop (on farmland) in the arid west and are more like shrubs. They harvest them at 7-10 years and they are hybrids that grow exceedingly quickly. I we used no new paper tomorrow, not a single living tree would be saved.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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
Every morning I check the obits and the financial pages. If I'm not listed as either dead or a millionaire, I get up and go to work.
Me wonders how much the newspapers will charge themselves for documenting their own demise.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.