Obit Research

A prevalent topic throughout our work the last several weeks has regarded the “featured” obit — a story of life, not death.  As has been previously highlighted on this blog, The Economist applies this theme in its obituary writing, choosing to focus on the anecdotes, accomplishments and biographical details of great lives lived, as opposed to the aspects of those figures’ demise.  Our research and conclusions have led us to believe that this approach is sound, and we believe it wise for publications to incorporate it.

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I always find it’s interesting to explore the different writing styles across countries. When I first got the assignment of obituaries in Wales, I expected it to be more or less influenced by British ones, probably due to the geographic reason.  But when I deep look at them, it seems I’m wrong. I tried to come to a conclusion about how obituaries in Wales look like in general. The result was I couldn’t. Different papers seem have different tastes.

Here’s a national paper South Wales Echo, whose obituaries seem more like resumes to me. I’ll show you an example.

Obituary: Emyr Currie-Jones

Dec 2 2008 by Catherine Mary Evans, South Wales Echo

EMYR CURRIE-JONES was one of the most worthy and estimable figures in local government, especially in educational affairs in Cardiff and Glamorgan, during the past half century.

He figured prominently in the resolution of several highly controversial issues during that period.

He was also the first chairman of the newly-created South Glamorgan County Council, serving from 1973 to 1975, and a member for the city’s Ely ward from 1981 to 1989.

Mr Currie-Jones, beloved husband of the late Mary, was born in Caernarfon and became a well-known and highly respected solicitor in Cardiff.

He acted as prosecuting solicitor for the Cardiff City Council from 1950 to 1955 and subsequently as partner in the practice of Rees, Currie-Jones, Davies and Evans in the Castle Arcade Chambers North until his retirement in 1987, later as consultant solicitor.

He was a past president of the Cardiff and District Law Society and a member of numerous councils and committees including the Welsh Joint Education Committee and Welsh Language Council.

For more than 20 years, Mr Currie-Jones was also a member of the Council of the then University College of Cardiff.

A fluent Welsh speaker, he had been involved in the affairs of his chapel at Minny Street, devoting many years to the chapel as its secretary.

He also served as a member of the Council of the Welsh Congregational Churches.

He was a past member of the Courts of Governors of the University Colleges of Swansea, the Council of the Welsh National School of Medicine, the Court of the National Library of Wales and the Welsh Books Council.

He also served for years on the Council of the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales and was the chairman of the executive committee of the National Eisteddfod when it was held in Cardiff in 1978.

He received a warm welcome when he attended some of the sessions of the Eisteddfod held in Pontcanna this year.

Mr Currie-Jones was awarded the CBE for his work in local government in 1976. He died on October 13.

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Besides what we’ve already discussed on this blog in terms of Facebook “memorializing” the profiles of deceased users, there’s another way that the dead are being remembered on the social network — with public groups set up to remember a particular individual.

This differs from the memorialized profile in two key ways.  First, these groups are impromptu, created by friends or loved ones after the individual has passed away, as a means of socializing with others that may have known the deceased.

Second, and I think more important, is that they are generally publicly accessible, whereas memorialized profiles are only accessible to those that were previously confirmed friends on Facebook.

What this public accessibility means is that people who may only have just joined Facebook, or old friends that may have lost touch can participate in the memorials.  These users would be locked out of the memorialized profile page, which, in a very real way, defeats the purpose of calling it a “memorial” at all.

Here’s one example of a Facebook group created as a memorial to a deceased user:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=175462972576&v=wall

My favorite obituary of this week was the one about Mr. Qian Xuesen’s death. As one of the most respectable scientists in China and probably in the world, I feel that his death was a great loss to China and human history. Mr. Qian lived a very dramatic life. He was educated in the States, but was also arrested for a reason that has never been proved. Finally, he went back to China and started to dedicate to China’s aviation industry.

I was really sad when I heard of his death and I read almost every obituary in all of the major newspapers.

• AP: Father of China’s Space Tech Program Dies at 98
• WSJ: Trained in the U.S., Scientist Became China’s ‘Rocket King’
• NYT: Qian Xuesen, Father of China’s Space Program, Dies at 98
• LA Times: Qian Xuesen dies at 98; rocket scientist helped establish Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• New Yorker: The Two Lives of Qian Xuesen
• Chicago Tribune: Father of Chinese missile programs
• Xinhua: China’s “father of space technology” dies at 98

Among all of them, I like the New York Times one and the Wall Street Journal one more than the others, because I found they provided more interesting detail information about Mr. Qian’s life both in the States and in China.

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(John Thadeus Delane, courtesy of Wikipedia commons)

Kate and I had a brief, affable back and forth during discussion last week about the historical tone of obituaries — i.e., “Was the content presented directly and concisely or expressively and at length?”

Research has shown that obits have been on a creative upswing since their inception at the dawn of the printing press, beginning as short [death] notices and transforming into storytelling tools a few hundred years afterward.  Pinning down where and when this revolution took place was a much easier task than expected, and there was one particular man to thank.

A Google Archive search of the obituary’s history, though surely imperfect and hardly scientific, reveals a timeline increasingly populated by the mid- to late-1800s.  Per a bit of research, there was a name in journalism that, not coincidentally, was prevalent in regards to obit writing during that period: John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London from 1841-77.

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Alina beat me to the punch in pointing out the rather broad coverage devoted to the new Facebook “recommend” functionality and the deceased.

According the The Guardian, it seems that Facebook actually has a mechanism for dealing with profiles of the dead.

“‘When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialised’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed,’ explained Max Kelly, Facebook head of security, on the company’s blog.

But what does it mean, that an account gets ‘memorialised’? The contact information and status updates are removed, and the profile is set private. No one can log into it any more. Only Facebook friends can locate the profile via search and leave posts on the wall for remembrance.“

Apparently, this mechanism isn’t well known,  or perhaps well implemented, since Facebook is still recommending that people re-connect with dead friends.

Of course, there is a simple solution to the problem of … expired … accounts on social media networks.

If you plan to have birth date data in a user’s profile, build in a data structure that allows you to note the death date as well, and ensure there is a mechanism for a friend or family member to update the account with death information.  Furthermore, integrate the idea that a user might pass away from the beginning of the design process.

It also might be beneficial to check new entries to the Social Security Death Index or a similar publicly query-able data source to get information on those who have died that may have been member of the site.  Sure, that adds administrative overhead, but if you are saving your clients even a little bit of grief in the long run, it’s a worthwhile investment of resources, I think.

Should this be standard operating procedure for all social media sites?  Feel free to discuss the idea in the comments.

Our research team brainstormed about what has changed in the world of obituaries yesterday. One consensus was the obituaries of the past were mostly about the facts of death, but it’s more about the facts of life today.

It recalled something I read from the research readings. That article was “The Changing Presentation of Death in the Obituary, 1899-1999″, which roughly analyzes the changing concept of obituaries in history.

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As our group works on designing and fleshing out ideas for an improved Legacy.com, we continue to discuss ways to supplement the standard obit with fabulous supporting content. Some thoughts involve using videos and audios when necessary, especially for instances when multimedia was an important part of the deceased person’s life.

For example, Vic Mizzy recently died. You might not recognize his name, but you certainly recognize two TV theme songs he wrote earlier in his life. Sure, The Addams Family and Green Acres stopped airing new episodes ages ago, but it’d be nice to be able to listen to those timeless jingles while reading Mizzy’s obituary. In our beginning prototypes, a legacy.com user would be able to accomplish this with a simple click of a mouse.

Also, why not have other professionals, besides journalists, written about a person’s life? Wouldn’t it be insightful to read a doctor’s point of view about a deceased pioneer in the medical profession?

(ED: Yes.)

As part of my obituary research I read an interesting study, “The Reporting of Grief”, by one newspaper of record for the U.S.: the New York Times.

The study seems to be more about articles about the grief process and grieving in general, rather than obituary writing, but I thought what the study said was interesting and telling. Here are some highlights:

• The study asks: Is grief socially constructed by the media?

• People, the study says, look to institutions to help them understand grief and give them instructions on how to grieve. The definitions provided by institutions are never all-inclusive, and leads to “disenfranchised grief.”

• The study says the media (and I would argue the larger American popular culture) present grief as an abnormal state of mind, something to be “cured” of.

• The study found that experts gave different, conflicting messages about grieving depending on the framing of reporters’ questions.

Also interesting is that during 2000-2006 articles equated handling one’s grief “well” with handling it quickly.  The study ends by recommending that topics not be chosen/constructed with the aim of “curing” or “taming” an illness, because grief isn’t an illness, but a personal journey.

For this project, I’ve been reading this book—The World of Obituaries. One thing, if not more, that interested me a lot was the difference between American obituaries and obituaries in other cultural environments.

The first discussion was about the term “obituary”. The author says that some English-language newspapers reserve the term “obituary” for staff-written obituaries and use such terms as “death notices,” “death announcements,” and the like for family-written ones. But Arabic and Persian-language newspapers do not make such a linguistic distinction but restrict the obituary pages to the family-written type and consider staff-written obituaries to be news items published in other pages of the newspaper in accordance with the importance of the deceased. That means, when famous people like presidents or major figures die, their deaths were usually reported as a news item on the front page, whereas less prominent people get written up in other pages. But when I did the interviews with staff writers with American newspapers, they told me that no matter whether the person was well-known or just an “average” person, as long as his/her life story was interesting, they would definitely choose this person to do a news obituary rather than just to put a death notice somewhere.

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