Searching yesterday for the obituary of a good friend who died
in Minneapolis brought me to several conclusions about obituaries and (paid)
death notices:
Newspapers should post them to the Web as soon as they have
been accepted into the "publish" queue in the computer system. Even though
many are now paid ads rather than editorial content, they're still news to
someone somewhere, and they ought be published as soon as possible. How hard
would it be to write a script that pushes them to the website immediately,
rather than feeding them out once a day? Not hard at all. They're
real
news to lots of people, and ought be treated as such.
In markets such as Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas-Fort Worth,
why doesn't
Legacy.com, which is
the back-end provider for the obituaries of
both newspapers, combine them into a single database? (It does, but it's a
national database. Here, I'm referring to a single "local" or "regional"
database.) Easy -- because the newspapers haven't expressly asked, or
demanded, that Legacy.com do so. In the end, wouldn't it make sense for the
readers/users? And shouldn't that be what this is all about?
Finally, now that so many newspapers have eliminated one of the
most important local editorial products they offer and converted it to paid
advertising in the name of saving space and "improving the content for the
audience" (by allowing families to publish as much as they want, unvetted by
the editorial process), newspapers should make sure that their obituaries
are searchable in their editorial databases, even the paid ads (death
notices/in memoriam ads in U.S. parlance).
