If you ever lost a friend who wasn’t fully appreciated, read Jim Naughton’s A Death Notice for Obituaries? Or read it if you’ve ever read an obituary for someone you didn’t know, but after reading the obit wished you had (like I wish I had known Tom O’Meara). Or read it if you ever were touched by a well-crafted obituary of someone you knew.
Obituaries are important news stories. As Jim Sheeler, author of Obit, tweeted of Naughton’s piece:
jimsheeler Great obituary within an obituary of the obituary. http://bit.ly/i1DX28
I don’t want to belabor Naughton’s points because he made them better than I could. I appreciate that he quoted my blog post last July about LancasterOnline charging frequent readers of its obituaries (but no other online readers).
What I do want to say is that I later noted that news organizations and individual journalists face a great opportunity to develop a new business telling life stories about the recently departed (and the living).
The biggest obstacle to building a new business around obits are the funeral homes.
It’s a pretty closed society, and it would be hard to do anything without their cooperation.
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I agree that working with funeral homes would be important, but I see them as a potential ally, more than an obstacle. They aren’t in love with newspapers. And they probably would refer clients to a service that offered to write stories (and handle the billing for you, with a markup).
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Buttry, NewsFuturist.com. NewsFuturist.com said: ‘A Death Notice for Obituaries?’ Or an opportunity for entrepreneurs? http://bit.ly/eiW4US (by @stevebuttry) […]
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I’m a former newshound who thinks your ideas about obits are quite sound. Newspapers could definitely increase circulation if they paid more attention to better-written obits.
Remember they said “People” would never make it?
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[…] (The link above is to a piece by the late Jim Naughton, A Death Notice for Obituaries, written in 2010, which prompted a response from me.) […]
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[…] ‘A Death Notice for Obituaries?’ Or an opportunity for entrepreneurs? […]
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