Obit Research

Researching how obituaries are written in Australia, I was quite surprised that I couldn’t find obituary sections in Australia’s major national newspapers. My first impression is that there isn’t as much cultural emphasis on obituaries as in other places such as the United States or England.

Two newspapers did include obituary sections: The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Examples of obituaries in these newspapers, however, only reinforce the point that obituaries don’t seem to play as big of a role in Australia’s newspaper culture.

In my opinion, the obituaries I saw in these newspapers were not particularly well written. For example, this Sydney Morning News obit of Nancy Petyarre, an aboriginal artist, was overly formulaic and kind of dry. Instead of an interesting article about this person’s life and achievements, this obit reads like a lengthy version of a death notice.

Another obit from the Age about Joseph Lester “Jody” Powell, White House Secretary under Jimmy Carter, is a bit more similar to British obituaries in its acknowledgment of controversy and scandal. For example:

“On the campaign trail he began by revealing that Carter’s net personal wealth was $US810,000 and his peanut farm was worth $US348,000 – but was soon confronted by Carter’s admission in a Playboy interview that he had committed ‘adultery in his heart many times’. Asked if such bluntness would hurt the Carter campaign, he calmly replied: ‘I can’t imagine that it would.’”

But aside from a few of those amusing glimpses into Powell’s career, the rest of the obit also sticks to the generic obit formula and it didn’t particularly hold my interest.

These obituaries definitely exhibit some influence from British obituary culture. Unfortunately they’re not nearly as interesting.

This past week the eight of use conducted paper prototyping and tested our ideas for Legacy’s new webpage on a few people. We drew out paper versions of the page and all the sections we want to include, and several of us marched to nearby coffee shops and academic buildings to interview people in our audience age group.

One of the main criticisms that stood out was regarding our concept of an editorial page, a potential section on Legacy.com that will include articles and editorials by a staff journalist, links to Associated Press obituaries, links to interesting obituaries from other newspapers like the New York Times and perhaps a section on who died on this day in history. It would involve mostly obituaries of prominent people, but not necessarily.

Read more…

ALINA (SEYMOUR FROMER):

A New York Times obituary of Seymour Fromer, a collector of one of the largest collections of Judaica in North America, including archives documenting the history of Jews in the American West. Kind of interesting.

IAN (CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS):

My favorite obits this week were of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.  He was terribly influential as a thinker, and leading proponent of structuralism.  Practically every high-quality obituary page ran something on him, and this is just one sample from the Guardian.

Read more…

In honor of Halloween, I would like to bring you a truly morbid post by pointing out two interesting trends in the realm of death this week.

First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.

Read more…

This past week I interviewed obituary writers in two different newspapers across the country, The Bradenton Herald in Bradenton, FL and the Greenville Sun in Greenville, TN. Both newspapers were mentioned in 2000-2001 by the Readership Institute as newspapers doing a good job providing obits to readers. I wanted to check what they are doing and how.

Read more…

MING AND IAN (HOWARD UNRUH):

(MING): The headline caught me in the first place. It seems that all the obituaries I’ve read before were talking about someone who either had achievement in a particular field or had a very interesting. meaningful life. But someone who killed 13 of his neighbors? Never. It’s more like reading a fiction story. When I was reading the details of the story, I could even picture the scene and it really terrified me. I was thinking that the military life this man experienced must have made him very scared, hurt or something. And. very ironically, after this, his life was all about sleeping and watching TV. His entire life literally left nothing but the massacre.

(IAN): I’m a sucker for a serial killer story.  I think it comes from my love of horror movies.  This guy, Howard Unruh, was a real-life monster, and never went to jail.  He lived out his days confined in a hospital for the criminally insane after killing 13 of his neighbors for seemingly no reason at all.

Read more…

“’I don’t how anyone did this job before Internet existed?’ … I can tell you how they did because I’ve been around”, said Patricia Sullivan, a Washington Post obituary writer and contributor to Post’s Post Mortem blog.

The internet revolutionized obituary writing like it did most other kinds of journalism. Before writers had to go to the library, Sullivan explained, and sift through phone books and archives. Now you can find phone numbers with a couple of keystrokes.

Last Sunday, Tiffany wrote about an entry from the Washington Post’s Post Mortem blog. Sullivan has been a Post obituary writer for the past six years. She and her colleagues started Post Mortem two years ago.

Read more…

We’re getting really creative …

TIFFANY (NAN ROBERTSON):

As an aspiring female journalist, I cannot help but give gratitude to Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times who died Tuesday at the age of 83. Nan made it possible for women to be respected and treated equally in the newsroom at a time when they were regarded as second-class citizens. I don’t think there is a woman in the media who doesn’t owe a great deal to Nan Robertson and her legacy.

MING (JULES POWER):

Hey, this guy was a Northwestern alum! The obituary really caught the point of Mr. Power’s life–his achievement in Children’s programming production. The comment from George Woolery’s book tells exactly what Mr. Power helped to introduce: basic science and something more meaningful by producing programs. And I also like the quote from Mr. Power before his first broadcast.

Read more…

This week I spoke with a 22-year-old friend who is quite atypical in terms of her use of the Internet for someone of her age.  When asked about Legacy and whether she would consider writing in a guestbook of someone who passed away, she said she “would definitely prefer to get a card and personally write it and send it as opposed to something online.” When asked where she would search for information on the grieving process, if she felt she needed it, I anticipated the answer to be search on Google. Instead she said she would go to the local hospital and see if they have resources there.

It surprised me greatly that someone my age, who should be used to the online world and technology by now, should prefer to do things in such a traditional way. I suppose that people born now will be much more immersed in technology as they grow up, but not all people in their early twenties are as comfortable with computers as I thought. This is something we should consider when imagining how obituaries could work better online, that some people, even young people, still prefer the traditional.

Ever since we’ve started working on this project, I have been thinking a lot about obituaries and I came to the conclusion that the concept of the long, narrative story commemorating a deceased is actually very foreign to me. In the book, “The Dead Beat,” Marilyn Johnson gives an “amusing” overview of the art of English-language obituaries, the journalists who write them and the fans that love them. But the book does pay some attention to the obituary traditions of other countries.

Johnson mentions how she encountered Uri Dromi, the only obituary writer in Israel, for Ha’aretz, a liberal newspaper. Dromi writes only two short stories about people who died every week. Having lived in Israel for 11 years as a child, the fact that Ha’aretz publishes even two obituaries is quite surprising to me.

Johnson wonders, “How is it possible in any country, but especially a country like Israel, crammed as it is with history and violence and eventful deaths?” This really resonated with me. When I was a child, I never saw either obituaries or death notices in newspapers. Death notices, the kind that just give generic information about the death of the person, were only placed as signs on walls around the neighborhood.

It is possible that I was so young that it never occurred to look for such a thing in the newspaper, but I have never seen longer obituaries in any Israeli media outlets, whether print or online. This is the case in spite of the fact that Israel has fought several wars over the last 60 years and there have been several suicide bombings in Haifa, the city where I lived.  Tragic as it is, there were many opportunities to write poignant stories commemorating those killed. And yet, I did a quick web search to see if Dromi’s stories are accessible online on the Ha’aretz website and I could not find any.

So, what I take away from all this is that people come from different places, have different traditions and beliefs. Although this project is geared mostly to a North American audience, we should not assume that a published story commemorating a person’s life is a self-evident concept for people. I am American, but it wasn’t for me.