Based upon the language and tone of this post, it frankly appears that your entire project amounts to just going through the motions of data-gathering, and then cherry-picking the results to produce a final product that you, yourselves, are comfortable with.

If it is your intention to become journalists, or to impress Legacy.com, or to simply get a passing grade from your instructors, then I would advise that “The editorial team” make a more concerted effort to curb such editorializing in the future.

Thanks for writing. We are well aware of the issue around legacy’s advertising. We are still in the process of narrowing down our final proposal to the company but we are definitely keeping this in mind.

The editorial team

My grandmother died last week, and family members placed an obituary in a newspaper which partners with legacy.com.

Both there, and on the legacy.com site, there are never any fewer than three ads displayed for unrelated products, often using flash animation.

they included coke, smokeless cigarettes, chocolate, mousetraps, laundry detergent, cars, banks, pizza, hair care products, etcetera.

i was, to put it mildly, very disturbed by this; I did a search to see if anyone online shared my opinion, and apparently some of the people you interviewed agree with me.

since their interviews are over, and they don’t have a chance to respond to your criticisms of their opinions, allow me to do so on their behalf.

Legacy.com needs to eat. Yes. That is true.

They have contracts with hundreds of newspapers around the country which provide a continual revenue stream.

Also, beginning with the innocent-sounding link “Keep guestbook online,” Legacy.com commences to offer an incredibly wide range of multi-tiered services for online memorials which provide a massive percentage of profit to the company, based upon their actual cost.

In addition, they redirect visitors to partner sites selling services such as flowers, photobooks, jewelry, etcetera. These are all things that grieving families might actually want to find, and i have no complaint with it, but there it obviously generates either a direct fee being paid to legacy.com by those companies, or there is a per-purchase commission they receive.

My point being, that if you eliminate the unrelated third-party advertising, you will see that Legacy.com is still, in fact, eating very, very well.

A company in the death industry that they would exploit the grief of their customers by trying to squeeze a few more pennies out of them with third-party ads, is, to me, completely unconscionable.

If you went to the funeral of a loved one, and found that the mortician had slapped a bumpersticker advertising Freschetta Pizza Crust on the side of their coffin, would your response honestly be “Oh well, I guess the funeral home needs to eat!”

Of course it would not. Because you would know that the family paid for a specific service, and more importantly, a service that is already completely inflated in price, and is one of the most sensitive services that anyone ever pays for, as it is at a time when they are very emotional (and thus suggestible, as well), and so for all those reasons and a dozen more, there is no possible justification for the bumper sticker to be there.

Legacy.com purports to handle the obituaries of two-thirds of all deaths in the united states. I was not involved in the decision of where to post my grandmother’s obituary, but I can assure you that when the day comes that I am in a position to have to make such a decision about memorializing a loved one, I will most definitely seek out a publication in the other 1/3.

As you said at the end of your post, “That’s just me.”