Bear with me for a moment and check out the beginning portion of a potential feature on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, revolutionary for his use of policy analysis in his post and controversial for his role in the Vietnam War:

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“At 5:15 one afternoon last week,” TIME wrote on Nov 12, 1965, “Norman Morrison, 31, his clothing doused in kerosene and his youngest child, 18-month-old Emily, cradled in his arms, stood outside the river entrance to the Pentagon and burned himself to death.”

He was a war protester, this Morrison.  This was the unraveling of the public debate, from marching to self-immolation.  This was the polarization that, no matter his intention, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, contributed to an increasingly fractured public during America’s most divisive war, clouding a unique résumé that made him one of the most fascinating men to hold the post.

McNamara’s managerial and analytical brilliance was indisputable.  As the eventual star of the “Whiz Kids”, a group of post-World War II ex-military that ascended Ford Motor Company’s executive ladder and righted the ship, he displayed a first-class aptitude for organizational capability, becoming the corporation’s president in 1960.  Although the Kennedy administration soon targeted him to head the Department of the Treasury, McNamara, despite his lack of military command, was recommended by Truman’s Secretary of Defense, Robert A. Lovett, for the same post.

“Mr. President, it’s absurd.  I’m not qualified,” McNamara humbly told Kennedy.   ”Look, Bob,” the president replied, “I don’t think there’s any school for Presidents either.”

McNamara was a rare figure in the administration—one of the few men who had John Kennedy’s ear in matters of national security, initially evidenced by his involvement in the backroom dealings of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  As such, his role as a policymaker was legitimized, leading him to cut waste, carve out a more efficient department and establish new guidelines for nuclear warfare.  In fact, it was McNamara who first clarified the once prevalent concept of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD).

However, his name would forever be etched in controversy for his authority in the planning and execution of the Vietnam War, colloquially known by many as “McNamara’s War”—blame that would trouble him in the years following his service.

…

What about it?  Are we on point in assessing that this is the type of story the obituary reader, whether intense or more fleeting in her interests, wants to read?

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.

It’s not an exception. All the obituaries I read from this newspaper mostly focused on the job titles of the deceased and whether he/she was awarded any kind of honorship without the detailed stories. So they didn’t really tell what this person’s life meant to the society, but a list of big titles.

Another national paper, the Evening Post, has a different approach. Its obituaries mainly focus on the interaction between the deceased and his/her family or friends. The article always starts with the funeral information, like this:

“MOURNERS are tomorrow expected to pay their final respects to a man who was allegedly murdered at his Llanelli home.

Richard Shrapnell, aged 36, died after an incident at his Ty Elizabeth flat on March 4.”

It’s a very typical lede of obituaries on the Evening Post. And the full article got a lot of the quotes from someone close to the deceased to talk about their feelings toward the person, like this:

“Richard was popular with a lot of people around here, and I’ll always remember him as a lovely man who would always help you out,” she said.

“He liked a laugh and a joke, and was full of life. I really feel for the family, especially his father — I don’t think it has sunk in for them yet.”

However, the obituaries didn’t tell the life story of the deceased. You may get a sense by reading these two examples.

• Death leaves friends ‘shaken and numb’
• ‘Remember Richard for how he lived, not how he died’

The obituaries on one of its local newspapers, Western Mail, tell more stories. Those are not in a British way, which is my favorite style. But still, there is something interesting to explore. Like this one about Tony Whitehead, a local film programmer:

Whitehead, a former Ormskirk Grammar School boy, doubtless garnered some of his writing and lecturing skills as a student at East Anglia University where he fell under the beguiling spell of Charles Barr, all-round British film expert and author of a definitive book on Ealing Studios. Whitehead revered those studio comedies of the late ’40s and early ’50s but he was equally loquacious discussing the merits of the Boulting Bros, with their scabrous, sometimes ambivalent, satires on social mores, or Launder and Gilliat.

See, this is a story, not something put on resume…However, one thing I’m so confused with this paper. It’s really uncommon to see the author writes as “the first person”. Like this:

He made me realise that Leigh was a Dickensian satirist – or more pertinently perhaps satirist in the Cruikshank, Hablot Browne (Phiz) or Hogarth mould with his propensity for drawing larger-than-life idiosyncratic characters or quintessential types, frayed with life or curling at the edges.

Hmmm, interesting…What do you think?

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

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.

One of the examples tells how important Mr. Qian was to the world’s aviation industry even when he hadn’t been back to China to design rockets.

“In 1949, Mr. Qian wrote a proposal for a winged space plane that the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology, in 2007, called an inspiration for research that led to NASA’s space shuttle,” says the New York Times.

As most people know, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s halted China’s progress in most areas of Chinese society. But it was not the case for Mr. Qian and his work. “Mr. Qian was largely shielded from the persecution faced by many intellectuals, said Qian Xuemin, a retired professor who is Mr. Qian’s cousin. Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai ‘recognized his importance, and they protected him,’” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apparently, Mr. Qian remained bitter about his treatment by the U.S. government. He never returned to the States. Neither the Journal nor the Times omitted this fact.

“In 1979, Caltech gave Mr. Qian its Distinguished Alumni Award, but Mr. Qian declined to travel to California to receive the prize in person. A former colleague from CalTech eventually brought the award to Mr. Qian in China in 2001, on his 90th birthday,” the Journal says.

“Mr. Qian never returned to the United States. In a 2002 published reminiscence, a Caltech colleague and professor, Frank Marble, stated that he believed that Mr. Qian had ‘lost faith in the American government’ but that he had ‘always had very warm feelings for the American people,’” says the Times.

If I have to choose one between these two obituaries, I think the Times won over the Journal because of its concise and compelling lede –

“Qian Xuesen, a brilliant rocket scientist who single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts after he was drummed out of the United States during the redbaiting of the McCarthy era, died on Saturday in Beijing. He was 98.”

Besides these two, I think the one from Xinhua news agency was also interesting because it gives information that American newspapers are not able to offer. It includes an interview with Mr. Qian’s colleague at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation; it tells a story about how Mr. Qian led the missile project team to overcome failures and finally helped China create its first medium- and short-range missile; it also shows a recent photo of Mr. Qian’s while the New York Times and the LA Times can only use the one of Mr. Qian’s 1948 photo provided by AP.

Now I’m done with my loved ones. The ones from AP, the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune were just OK to me. Nothing wrong, but just I didn’t feel they were exciting.

I don’t like the one on the LA Times for two main reasons. One is I think the chronic order of the narration was not clear enough. The other reason was I think the last sentence was really redundant. It says, “He is said to have supported the government’s crushing of the rebellion in Tiananmen Square in 1989.” First of all, it’s something that’s “said to be.” As a responsible journalist, shouldn’t we avoid such unsubstantiated source that may lead our readers make any illegitimate judgment on that?  Moreover, I didn’t see any meaningful and necessary reasons here to talk about this.

(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.

In 2007, The newspaper company’s publishing arm released Great Victorian Lives – An Era in Obituaries, a collection of some of the paper’s highest profile obits of the 1800s, and the paper’s preview singles out Delane’s contributions to obituary writing:

“… under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style – and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match. The death of [the Duke of] Wellington, Delane told his deputy, “will be the only topic”.

For the sake of contrast, notice how the New York Times handled its front page coverage of President Lincoln’s assassination with nary an expressive word, and how that starkly differed from this, which appeared in Delane’s paper:

“The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation.”

Ann Wroe would be proud.

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.

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.

The author gives some actual obituary examples to illustrate his idea. From what I read, in 1899, the details that would allow the reader to more fully construct a narrative about a decedent’s end-of-life experience were often printed with generous specificity, which means the focus was the physical experience of the deceased.

As a conclusion, the author says that the obituaries from the New York Times in 1899 often detailed the following seven contents:

(1) The time of death, sometimes precise to within five minutes,

(2) the names and treatment strategies of attending physicians,

(3) the strength and condition of the deceased,

(4) The discussion of complications from medical procedures,

(5) Attempts at recuperation and resuscitation,

(6) Levels of pain,

(7) Levels of consciousness.

However, this kind of information is marginalized in contemporary obituaries, such as the example from the New York Times in 1999. That obituary chronicled a number of the important biographical elements of the person’s life, such as his role in the development of the atomic bomb and in the course of the Cold War. Aside from the actual cause of death, details about the dying process are completely omitted from the newspaper report. This is typical of the manner in which the biophysical aspects of death are treated in contemporary obituaries. More biographical information was printed.

Today, obituaries still discuss death with normative themes, only the focus of the discussion has changed with the themes of resistance and self-actualization increasingly emphasized. The core concern of the most recently published obituaries studied here is the reporting of individual biography, accomplishment, and personality, as what we read today on newspaper obituary sections.

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.)

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.

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.

The second interesting discussion was about the distinct feature of British obituaries. You probably know that British obituaries are well-known for talking frankly about life and lead the supposed-to-be serious obituaries into a comic world. As discussed in this book, British newspaper obituaries have undergone a drastic change during the past twenty years or so. They are described in an article in The Economist as constituting “a genre that is changing and developing into something of a cult: obituaries as entertainment”. Their style is described as being “anecdotal, discursive, yet elegantly concise; learned, touching, and in a kindly way, often extraordinarily funny”.

Not all newspaper obituaries, however, are as “entertaining” as the British ones. Especially when we talk about obituaries in America, one may characterize them more as matter-of-fact, more serious and respectful. So the American obituaries focus more on describing the accomplishments of the deceased and both this person’s personal and professional attributes by which the writer of the obituary hopes the deceased would be remembered.

The last but not least thing I’d like to present here was the author’s observation of the difference in terms of religions.

For example, the Arabic and Persian obituaries are set in a frame of religious language much more so than are the English obituaries. They tend to quote a verse from a holy book or introduce the obituary in language borrowed from religious ceremony. The Egyptian obituaries tend not to express personal feelings toward the deceased unless the deceased is young and the death unexpected. The Persian and English obituaries tend to express more feelings: the English by using such words as “beloved,” “devoted,” and the like; the Persian by describing feelings of loss felt by the family, whole names usually appear after the text and a t times by showing concern over the happiness of the departed soul, soliciting help from friends and relative through their participation in the ceremonies. The English obituaries tend to be more formulaic in their expression of “feelings” then the Persian obituaries. The Arabic obituaries seem to be the longest and least personal of all.