Not sure of the terminology, but here goes: I pit the Obituary section of newspapers. Ghoulish bloodsuckers, battening on the bereaved. Today I submitted my sister’s obituary to 2 suburban weeklies, and got a bill for $445. For a 197 word obit with a small photo, to appear once, on this coming Friday only, in each paper. I submitted the same obit to one of our Vancouver dailies and was billed $425. To appear once, this Friday.
Many people think obituaries are free and are amazed to learn otherwise. I knew they weren’t free and remember vividly the shock of the bill for my father’s obituary 12 years ago, but I cannot understand how they can charge ADVERTISING rates for a death notice!!! How can this be justified? I suppose they know damned well people will pay – who wants to look “cheap” over a thing like this? It has really got to me, added to the sorrow over my sister’s death. I suppose I’ll get over it, and of course the bills will be paid, but right now I think the publishers ought to be tarred and feathered, then burned at the stake and pulled apart by draught horses tied to their arms and legs. And then buried in an unmarked grave with no obituary in any newspaper or anywhere else.
Holy crap! That’s “big city” rates, I think? Mom’s obituary this past March was free at the smalltown paper, and not that expensive at the other paper. The catch was, you could only include so much information, beyond that was considered extra and there was a charge for it. I’m sorry to hear about the loss of your sister, my condolences.
As for why I didn’t ask beforehand? I was going to submit the items regardless of the cost. My family wants the notices in the papers, so in the papers they are to go. I could have said, “No, that’s too much, don’t bother”. My father’s obituary cost a lot, so I knew approximately what this was going to cost.
I think the cost is too high, however. They seem, to me, to be like the funeral directors who talk people into buying expensive coffins and funerals. It’s not something a person does very often, and you are easy prey when you are under emotional stress and are grieving.
A) Many newspapers (most? I don’t know) publish a death notice for free. These are bare-bones, listing name, date of birth, date of death, residence, survivors, things like that. The ones that cost more are the flowery “Joe loved woodworking and his family will always remember him for the matching set of enema holders he handcrafted for them for Boxing Day in 1987.”
B) It’s a business. Wages are increasing, costs are increasing, the bottom is dropping out of ad sales. One of the reasons the paper is there for you to be able to put your notice in is because they’ve charged people just like you in the past, and one of the reasons they’ll be there in a month for someone else is because they charged you. And to take a more cynical view of it, while there’s a lot of concern about ad sales drops, nobody’s going to put an obit on craigslist (yet).
C) It’s a private enterprise. Why would you feel like you have a right to put ANYTHING in the newspaper without paying anything other than advertising rates? There’s news, and there’s the stuff that pays for bringing you the news. Your situation falls into the second half.
All the more reason for somebody to send out a mass email to my friends and enemies letting them know that a large hambone will be jammed in my bum at 1100 on Friday before the town dogs are permitted to drag away my carcass. Spend the $870 on a good party, instead.
I do think the rates seem rather excessive, sure it may technically be advertising but it’s not advertising for any type of gain; you’re not a business and you’re not trying to get people to come buy items or a service or vote for you, so you would think they could reduce the rates a little.
As someone who works at a paper which recently went from unpaid to paid obits, I can give my experience.
The reason we switched over is because we were sick of getting complaints about cutting things out of the obit. When we did them free, it was not a death notice, it was an obit, but we would cut out all the fluffy stuff about how much they loved their cats and their grandchildren and the little boy down at the bus stop, and change all the “Joe passed away/went to the angels/departed this earth to go eat pie with the Lord Jesus Christ” junk to just “Joe died on x date.” We got a lot of flak for that from the funeral homes, so we switched to paid obits and said “okay, now you can put in 4,000 paragraphs about how they polished their cat every day, but it’ll cost you $4 a line.” We only bill the funeral homes, and they can choose how much of that cost they pass along to the families. We don’t accept obits from private parties, only through the funeral home, to avoid getting caught up in family conflicts. (“No! We don’t want Aunt Maylene in the obit, even though she was the love of Joe’s life, because one time she took a dump on my dog and I don’t like her!” and then we end up with a version with Aunt Maylene, and one without, and one with her in it but where she’s referred to as “the poopy-panted skank Joe was married to” and there’s no “official” version to refer to.)
Now, we get money for the obits, and people can put all that eye-rollingly silly stuff in there about how they were an “avid bowler” or whatever. If they just want a little notice about where the memorial services will be (literally the name, date and place of death, and the arrangements/donation info and nothing else), we do that for free.
What burns my butt about it is that in all my local papers weddings, engagements, anniversaries, graduations, and birth notices are free no matter the size. However when my brother recently died I was charged $90.00 an inch at one paper, .25 cents a word at another, and the third wanted an extra 150.00 for a small picture. Yes obits take up space but so do the rest of life’s markers, and to only charge people who are grieving is a preditory move to say the least.
You can bet the funeral homes pass on all and then some to the famlies. We had to pay a rental fee for every stand flowers were set on at the funeral. Sometimes more than tha flowers had cost. A paper that would not allow me to put an obit in without paying the funeral home for the privilage would never see another dime of advertising money from me.
Here in Australia, the ‘Death Notice’ (the bare-boned one/s) costs money in the major papers, while the fully-fledged obituary is treated as a feature and is therefore free. However, only people of some note get an obit. Your average Uncle Joe or Grandma Edna won’t get a look in unless they were ‘famous’ in some way.
I figured as much about the funeral homes. It’s a really predatory business, much more so IMO than the paper is for charging a little for the obit. There’s no excuse for charging $400, I agree, but someone does have to do work to put the obit in the paper, and the copy we get from funeral homes frankly looks like it was written by mental patients half the time, with place names, people’s names, normal words like “formerly,” etc. misspelled. (I’m talking about the obits where the FH takes the info down from the people and then writes the obit themselves. The ones we get where the family wrote it themselves and then sent it to us through the FH are usually more sentimental, but much better written.)
My paper does obit articles for free as well, for people who used to be mayor, well known local pastors, local philanthropists, etc. We also do a weekly feature on Sunday called “A Life Remembered,” where one of the reporters calls up survivors on obits of “ordinary” people and writes a long (about 1/3 of a broadsheet page) article about them. It’s a really cool feature, which really shows how everyone’s life can be an interesting story.
Yeah, I agree about that, but I think we should charge for all of them, on the same principle as the basic reason why you should pay for obits – because the newspaper staff have to spend time dealing with them, and, as hard as it is for a lot of people to accept, they’re not really news to anyone who doesn’t know you.
Plus, if we charged for wedding announcements, people would have to pay again when it has to be re-put in the paper three times because THEY can’t spell their own freaking grandma’s last name. It would soothe my aggravation a little at being screamed at for their mistake if they had to pay to get it in the paper again.
I just signed an online guest book before coming here. My old boss’s mother passed away and I left a note that I was thinking of her and her family.
The Obit expressed that contributions can be made to Make A Wish, maybe they should state contributions can be made to the paper to pay for the obit. Geez
In a large city I can see your point but I’m dealing with small town newspapers. If they didn’t print that stuff the paper would only be three pages and that’s thanks to high school sports. So I fail to see why obits should be treated any differently than other life markers.
When my parents died, I sent in obituary notices automatically.
There was a huge pile of official paperwork (death certificates, wills, final tax details, closing accounts etc), plus all the funeral arrangements.
It’s sad that there’s so much to do at a time of grieving.
I guess I was lucky that I live in a town of 10,000, because i don’t remember any serious fees from the local paper.
When my wife died four years ago the cremation service arranged for notices to be placed in both major Chicago newspapers. These were the basic “name, DOB, DOD, list of relatives, and a few personal details” type, and I was later billed just under $200 by both papers for this. Interestingly enough, the cremation service also spoke to someone at the Chicago Tribune who talked to me a few days later and wrote a biographical article about Patti, which was printed at no charge.
