Poynter Online invited the editors of three papers mentioned in the accompanying article -- the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and the Lakewood Sentinel -- to offer their views of obituaries -- how newspapers handle them now and what they might do in the future. We've heard from two of the editors, and have posted their comments below:
John Temple, editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News:
I am sorry to hear about Steve's experience with the
Rocky Mountain News. He's absolutely right that he should have been directed to YourHub.com, our citizen-journalism initiative. He also should have been treated with greater sensitivity.
Our failure to refer Steve to YourHub.com had nothing to do with money. It is our newsroom policy to direct people to YourHub.com whenever we can't get their story into the Rocky - and even when we can. There's no reason they should be restricted from telling their story in more than one place.
I believe news obituaries are an important part of any newspaper. But clearly they cover only a tiny percentage of the people in our readership area.
My view of the paid death notices - I bought one in another city for my own father - is that they are a good way for a family to guarantee that the news of a death is delivered before the funeral or memorial service to a large audience of people who might have known the deceased or his or her family. Frankly, they can be an improvement over the free notices we used to offer because we couldn't guarantee that a brief news death notice would appear before a service.
I know the Denver Newspaper Agency tries to serve people dealing with a death in their family with consideration when it explains the various services it offers. I welcome his suggestions of how the Rocky and the agency could improve our service and have already notified the responsible people at the agency about his suggestions. I agree with Steve that obituaries should be important part of a newspaper's Web site. Clearly we still have a ways to go to make them so.
_________________________________________
Mitch Pugh, editor of Mile High Newspapers (which includes the Lakeland Sentinel):
Do newspapers, in general, do a good job of handling obituaries? The answer is absolutely not. I agree with Steve Outing’s assessment that our industry’s performance in this area of service is depressing. In fact, the way we deal with most milestones in our readers' lives is noticeably lacking. Think about the most important things that happen in a lifetime — birth, graduations, engagements, marriages, more births, anniversaries and, ultimately, death. Now think about how well represented these significant events are in our news pages. And we wonder why we are losing readership each year….
Community newspapers have long had an advantage over metro dailies in this regard. In fact, the Mile High Newspapers (formerly the Sentinel and Transcript Newspapers) have long published such announcements in our newspapers free of charge. Of course, the effectiveness and importance we place on those reader-submitted announcements has varied and has not always been sufficient.
I think our newspapers do a better job than the metro dailies when it comes to handling these milestones. Still, we need to improve, both as a service to our readers and, frankly, in our own self-interests as journalists. There is huge readership potential in placing more importance on these important events in our readers’ lives. It’s amazing, if you think about it, that we have come this far as an industry while virtually ignoring these life stories.
I’m not advocating that an obituary or engagement announcement has the same news value as the events of the day, whether indictments, natural disasters, elections, etc. But these items deserve a more prominent place in our newspapers and journalists dedicated to helping the people who submit them do so in an effective, engaging and respectful way.
Metro dailies’ paid obituaries, with their impersonal format, confusing policies and procedures and poor placement, are insulting. Even the process by which community newspapers like ours collect this type of information is, at times, cold and matter-of-fact.
Finding answers to the obvious problems, however, is a significant challenge. Speaking only for my own newspaper company, we need to do a better job of incorporating our user-submitted news site, www.MyMileHighNews.com, into the process, giving our readers even more freedom and options in honoring their loved ones. Whether they be obituaries or graduation announcements, the multi-media opportunities are exciting. We also need to make sure that the pieces we publish in the print edition aren’t busy work, and that a capable editor is overseeing the process to identify those items that deserve further attention. For instance, one of our goals is to publish weekly a staff-written obituary about a person who has likely never been in the newspaper before.
Several newspapers are doing a lot of these things (and more) already and with great success. We need to learn from these models and embrace their results, because the bottom line is that the way we handle obituaries and other milestones is indicative of some of our larger problems:
• We are still too inflexible and resistant to change.
• We are often self-important; our standard of what is “news” has more
do with our desire for validation from our sources and peers than what our readers want.
• Institutions drive our news coverage more than people do.
Of course, the easy part is identifying the problem. It’s up to us to continue to develop solutions that take advantage of our inherent strengths. Despite all the hand wringing about this issue and others, the majority of us are sharp and well-meaning folks who can rise to this challenge.
