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.

We developed this idea from the perspective that there is some journalistic value to the obituary form that needs to be pointed out. However, a problem has come to our attention that the audiences that come to Legacy.com are vastly different. Some come because they are grieving for a loved one, some come to search for someone not so close to them who died, and others come to read interesting obituaries.

Would the first two groups find such a section offensive? Two of the people we spoke to, thought so. One employee from the department of comparative literature at Northwestern University didn’t understand why this section should even be included on the site. It’s a distraction for her, because if she is there, she is visiting for a specific purpose that’s likely not to read interesting obituaries. A section on historical deaths is kind of gimmicky, she also said. Another employee from the department of geology thought that a section like this is kind of creepy, kind of like “featuring deaths” in a similar way to previews of movies in theaters.

This is only the opinion of two people, but the big issue we are faced with now is whether to maintain this section as part of the main Legacy site, or to suggest creating a new website intended entirely for a non-grieving audience interested in well-written, interesting obituaries. If we do maintain this as part of the main page, is there a differnce between featuring an article about Ted Kennedy versus Farah Fawcett for example? It’s a decision that so far hasn’t been easy to make.

Today we tested our tests on two generous NU undergraduate students and got some very valuable information that will help us when we begin our actual testing next week.

The most and possibly best feedback we received was on the homepage design. We have been working on two versions of the page; one with a lot of different information all laid out for the user, and another version with the features and services dispersed into different categories, separated by tabs.

Our research team was pretty evenly split on which design would be best, and I think it’s safe to say that a few more rounds of user testing will solidify which version will be most optimum.

There are definitely some word choices we need to work on in an effort to make search criteria and subject headings more clear to the user. For instance, we think the word newspaper is clearer to a user than the word publication, when they are searching for an obituary or death notice from a particular newspaper or publication. (Have I said newspaper and publication too much?)

But perhaps most importantly, on Halloween Eve, we have decided that we must have plenty of candy to offer to our testing subjects as an incentive/thank you. And we need to make sure that Jake doesn’t eat it all during the testing.

According to Danica Sherrill, a Bradenton Herald employee who spoke to me about their newspaper’s obits, the newspaper publishes between ten to twenty obits a day. The numbers always increase in the winter because all the “snow birds”, that is people who like to move to warmer locations during winter, come down to Bradenton and then some of them, of course, die.

The newspaper prints short obits of 50 words or less for free and runs longer stories about the deceased for a fee. But the most interesting thing about the Bradenton Herald is that the staff doesn’t write any of the obits, neither the free nor the longer, paid versions. The families write them all. “We don’t write them, we just publish them, “ Sherill told me.

The Greenville Sun does have staff writing their obituaries. They have a person who is not a reporter whose job is to write the basic death notices each day. Longer news stories about the deceased will be written by John Jones, the obit editor or by a staff reporter assigned to the task. All their obituaries are free.

The Greenville Sun caters to a small community of 66,000 people. As a result there are many families who have lived in the community for a long time and everyone knows everyone. As a result, Jones said, they often hold other stories for a day or two if an obituary needs to run.

“We feel that there is probably nothing short of a declaration of war that a more pressing general readership interest than the obituary section of a community newspaper,” Jones said.

My impression is that each newspaper handles obits in a way that befits their particular community. These two newspapers have two very different strategies, but strategies that clearly work.

I had the enviable task of compiling all of these interviews, hoping to make some inferences on the general public’s opinions of obituaries. Our sample of interviewees comprises men and women, between the ages of 21 and 42, residing in locations from New York to Boise.

One of the first questions on our list was, “When you think of an obituary, what comes to mind?” Not surprisingly, most responses sounded something like, “Death,” “Death” and “Death.” The older the interviewee was, the less likely they were to give such a straightforward answer.

Similarly, the younger a person was, the less likely they were to read obituaries on any kind of a regular basis. And why not? “The connotation of obituaries is so melancholic that it isn’t an emotion I want to tap into that often,” one responder answered. Since the start of this project, I have said that we need to let people know that obituaries are not just about death. Yes, death is the cause of the article, but it isn’t the content. (I believe this was also mentioned in Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat, as well).

We got mixed reviews on our proposition to hire a professional journalist to write a loved one’s obituary. Some said “absolutely not” and others were quite keen on the idea. “It’s the quality of the writing that matters.” Anyone out there in blog land have an opinion on this idea?

There was also a wide range of answers to questions on advertising content. Several said that there shouldn’t be any advertising, which, I mean, come on. We all need to eat! Even the folks over at Legacy. Others just said to keep it tasteful, and suggested that a cigarette ad shouldn’t be on the memorial page of someone who died of lung cancer.

One of my favorite responses was to a question on what would be inappropriate on a site like Legacy.com. “Good time stuff,” one person said. She was adverse to the idea of memorial pages including adds for strip clubs, escort services and the like. I think we can all agree on that.

Personally I think advertising can be somewhat consoling in difficult times. Imagine the following scenario: You have just returned home from the funeral of a relative, such as an aunt or uncle. You’re rather bummed out and aren’t sure what to do next. You flip on the TV, and there is the talking baby E-Trade commercial. Always good for a laugh. Next comes a spot for Sonic, or some other local eatery. Now with your spirits slightly lifted, you and your other grieving relatives decide not to wallow in your sorrows and go have dinner together. With a meal in your stomach, (eating is not a grieving person’s first priority) you start to remember the funny stories about Uncle Jim, rather than just dwell on the sad fact of his death. But that’s just me…

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.

I began my interview with Sullivan with a question about the Posts’ obituary readership. “From all evidence we have it’s increasing pretty significantly,” Sullivan told me, listing the reasons on the growing popularity of obituaries in general and that the Post always tries to make obituaries more interesting and more stories of people’s lives.

Baby boomers are aging, Sullivan also told me, and suddenly they are reading obituaries. This past summer there have been many deaths of people who were really well known when baby boomers were young.

“When your childhood idols die, you pay attention, or your peers die, you pay attention too,” she said.

The Post’s obituary department writes about those important and well-known, but also about those who have lived in the community a significant amount of time. “Balancing that mission has always been an art form,” Sullivan said.

The purpose of the “Post Mortem” blog, Sullivan said, is to engage with readers and give them a sense of what’s out there, give them a behind the scene look at how obituary writers do their jobs.

The Post is actually in the process of redesigning their obituary blog as well as obituary website. They are looking to bring in more content, Sullivan said, which is a constant challenge in a busy newsroom. They want to improve user interactivity, which means beyond the current comments section and underused discussion forum. They want to include more photos and more original video and audio.

“This is like blog 1.0 and we’re now moving to blog 2.0, and I can see down the road about the 3.0 that we need to get to,” Sullivan said.

The Post’s obituary writing process is simple: For the basic obituary, the family sends the newspaper basic information. The writers call the family back and ask follow up questions. They search files, sometimes interview other people, and fact check as much as possible. For an obituary of a major person in the community, the writers talk to the family, ask questions only the family can answer such as the cause of death (the Post always states the medical cause of death), names of survivors and where they live and previous marriages (the Post always includes previous marriages). The writers also conduct rigorous interviews with a family member, they search archives and interview other people who knew the deceased and can provide context. Then they are ready to write the story.

“There’s always selection, always news judgment going on, and that’s what it comes down to, news judgment,” Sullivan said.

The criteria are simple: The person had to die within 30 days; the family has to answer all the questions and the person needs to have lived and been engaged in the Washington community for 20 continuous years. “And still with that we get 300 obits a month,” Sullivan said.

There isn’t as much criteria for the blog, Sullivan said, just whatever the writers think might be interesting to readers. They post their “daily goodbye” so there’s something new every day. “I get up in the morning in my pajamas and do it early from home so we can post it early,” she said.

I also asked Sullivan to compare the Post’s obituary writing style with the style of British newspapers. The British give outright opinions and write with a lot of attitude, Sullivan said. This kind of thing just doesn’t work in the US.

“I think it has to do with English and American sensibility because people in America treat death and obituaries differently,” she said. The English obituaries really are a delight to read but American readers are appalled. They don’t want to read that.

Having served as the Tribune’s chief obituary writer for three and a half years, Jensen writes about seven stories a week among the total 15 to 20 staff produced obituaries.

“We certainly have an editor at my desk, but I’m pretty self-contained,” Jensen told me that he finds stories mostly by himself, sometimes getting suggestions from families, friends, colleagues and funeral homes.

“I sit down each day and go through the deck of submissions of death notices in the area and sources I have, trying to find the most interesting stories,” he said.

Here’s the answer: Interesting story! Yes, Jensen told me he didn’t think there’s a totally subjective set of criteria that he’s looking for when he comes to work each day, but he always wants an interesting obituary that can “make people feel like either you knew the person or you’d like to know the person.”

“I did an obituary about a guy who lived in the same home for seventy years and ate dinner in the same place every night for thirty. He just had this very routine. But within that routine, he built a real kind of interesting life form himself,” Jensen said. “So, I really want something that makes one stand out, makes the person pop as it would if you’re doing a feature when they’re living.”

Do they focus on “well-known” people? Not really. Jensen told me even when they write about the famous people, the Tribune pays much more attention to local ones but not national figures.

“We leave those to the LA Times or wires,” he said. “And we don’t have a lot of celebrities in Chicago. The celebrities here are more those politicians. So if city alderman dies or primary sectary for the mayor dies, you have to do them, because they’re at that level.”

“But I really don’t know how to define the ‘well-known’. Like this guy I wrote today was a local official of the Illinois Council. He’s definitely not universally ‘well-known’, a big pie, but he’s still famous locally,” he said.

Jensen told me that as a local newspaper, they always try to find more or less connection with local community that people would feel closer to the deceased in some ways, whether you find out you went to the same college or you joined the same organization.

Beyond that, Jensen also keeps diversity in mind. He said he read an article from the New York Times, explaining why women have been being unrepresented in obituaries.

“People largely written about are in their 70s and 80s, which means their active life was in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And there weren’t as many women maybe in the world place or being CEOs of the companies that time. So that might be one factor,” he explained. “We’re still dealing the world of 50’s or 60’s in our obituaries today, not the world of 80’s or 90’s.”

Even though he has to keep this in mind, Jensen said he doesn’t look at it that way, because his main purpose is still to find the most interesting stories.

“Sometimes it’s interesting just because this person had a friend who really knows how to tell a story,” he said. “And when you talk to the friend, one thing leads to another, they can lay out a good story of this guy.”

And good story tellers are just everywhere. And mostly they’re willing to call to get their deceased loved one a news obituary. Jensen found they were quite helpful, though the amount of calls is far beyond what he needs.

“I get calls constantly,” he said. “It’s hard to say no when I tried to put myself in a situation I have to say no. I hate to turn people down, but you look at what you have each day and what you actually can do, you have to let them know ‘sorry, I have the information, but please hold on. I’ll call if I can.’”

But a good thing for Jensen is that he’s not constrained by space limit.

“Our space limit is matched by our staff deduction, so now I’m not limited on space too much,” he said. “If I have someone interesting to write about, I can write longer. That’s really not an issue.”

Jensen told me that he believes that a good obituary writer has to be able to talk to people and get them talk to you. The process of doing an obituary seems like a whole process of having conversations, starting with the family.

“I try to find out the biographic information from the spouse or children, like a resume and see if there’s something interesting along the way and branch out from there,” Jensen said. “Then you go to this person’s world to find out more. If you write about life of business, then you want someone who worked with the guy; if you write about an academic, you want people in that field who can comment on his contribution to that field.”

It seems impossible to get all those things done in a day, but do they really need to?

“I see a great value of timeliness if the person is famous and we’ll post the obituary online immediately, putting up whatever we can get and keep refreshing during the day,” Jensen said. “But if the deceased is an ‘average person’ with interesting story, it’s always not an issue to take another day or more because you’re not alerting people breaking news of this person’s death but writing an interesting story, so in this case, timeliness is less far important to me.”

Jensen really doesn’t like the idea of writing a family or friend an obituary since it’s inevitable to have bias when you write about a loved one.

“Even there are cases that staff writers knew someone really well, we’ll discuss ‘do you really want them, writing about that?’” he says. “Generally the answer is no. We don’t want friends to get involved.”

However, family and friends can definitely provide paid death notices. Different from what they call “news obituaries”, death notices are handled by classified ads people and funeral homes associate a lot. There literally can be a large amount of death notices and they can be longer ones if more people pay and pay more.

“On Sundays, you can have a hundred of death notices while we have only one or two stories,” Jensen said. “Though other classified has shrunk at newspapers, but there’s still a healthy amount of classified ads every day.”

Jensen has a strong feeling of the difference between death notices and obituaries.

“Some people say ‘thank you for the tribute’, but I hate that people call my story a tribute because I’m really not trying to write a tribute, but trying to write a little profile of a person,” he said.

But sometimes, people might be easily confused.

“They call to ask ‘how much do we pay to get a news story?’I said we don’t accept payment,” Jensen said. “I certainly see the difference of what’s reported and written as a feature versus what’s given by funeral home and family.”

Jensen reads obituaries of the New York Times every day and he appreciates a lot of great obituary writers for writing interesting stories, including names like Robert McG. Thomas, the Times’ statuary, who extended the possibilities of the conventional obituary form, “shaking the dust from one of the most neglected areas of daily journalism”.

“I don’t know a lot of papers that are doing very serious obituaries. When I say serious, I mean seriously approaching obituaries, like the LA Times or the New York Times,” Jensen said. “They fund the voyage, so their writers are always ready to take off. But we don’t have staffs to do that here and not many papers have ability to do that.”

Comparing American obituaries with British ones, Jensen said British obituaries are well known for their frank of talking about the death, in which way that produces fun stories, but Americans are a little bit more cautious and gracious to survivors’ and other family members’ feeling.

“But everything can happen in America and I certainly see it can happen with blog writings,” he said. “It might not be the case for the Times or Tribune though.”

The message that Jensen said he was always fear of getting from a family next day was “who are you writing about?” So he’s really careful about what he writes.

“Fortunately, I never got this message,” he smiled.

Is it possible that such drastic changes are needed to entice America’s young generation to pay closer attention to today’s obituary culture? As a mid-20s male myself, I sometimes find it hard to pick up a newspaper or visit a Web site and spend a lot of time perusing the obituaries section. At my age, I don’t always want to think about the end, especially before the middle or even the beginning have truly commenced.

Maybe changing the actual term is taking it a little too far, but it seems as though altering the stigma could mean gains in young adult readership. The first logical step is to continue to transform the obituary, and even the death notice, into more of a story as opposed to an announcement.

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.

Death? Sad news? Someone passed away?

Hmm, these are probably the answers of most young people of our generation. But Laura Palencia has a different one.

“The last page of the Economist comes to mind, because I read its obits at the end of the magazine,” she was sitting at a Starbucks, telling me her experience as an Economist obits fan.

Did you remember where you read Ted Kennedy’s obituary? Google news? Palencia got it from the Economist. She even kept looking for Michael Jackson’s for a while.

“It seems they never published it. Then I just read it online on one of the Google news link.”

For some reason, Palencia didn’t find the obituary of Michael Jackson on the Economist. Actually they did one. But still, she surprised me by doing so because I never met someone of my age was so into obituaries, which I even didn’t realize that they exist on newspapers since I knew there was a thing called “newspaper” and there was another thing called “obituary”.

Palencia has her reasons.

“I like reading it to get the perspective of a post-life and the analysis of how this person’s life really meant.”

She told me it’s far more different to write people when they’re still alive than looking back into their life after death, which makes the obituaries seem interesting.

“But I like my news to have a story,” she said.

Well, a very interesting question actually arises from her response here—should obituaries be told in a straight or interpreted way?

Palencia believes that the Economist is doing the latter, which is an essential reason for her to read it.

“Some people think news shouldn’t have an opinion, and a news story should just focus on the facts,” she said. “I preferred an interpreted obituary than just a fact, because I find that a lot more interesting.”

Palencia told me she thought it depends on how a person judges news. Specifically referring to the obits on the Economist, she considers them as stories with writers’ interpretation, which not only tells about what happened but what we could think of it and get out of it.

Then I asked myself, what I would prefer if I read obituaries? I think my answer would be exactly the same. An editorial obituary sounds more appealing than one just of facts, doesn’t it? But you may have a different thought. Why not sharing with us?

Another interesting thing that Palencia bought up was her thinking of oneself to write an obituary blurb before one passed away. And the writer who writes this person’s obituary may use it as reference, to see how this person judging his own life.

“It might sound weird, but it would be kind of interesting,” she said.

Here are some things they said that I find especially interesting:

My interviewees don’t use social media, such as Facebook, to memorialize people. One person said it would be “weird” to see a memorial page there, and on first thought I think so too. My interviewees talked about wanting to remember someone in a more private way, and I’m interested to know if this is a generational thing, or something else.

My interviewees are also unanimously opposed to paying to read archived obituaries, sign guest books, or pay for online obituary services, including paying to have a journalist write an obituary for them. One even expressed disgust at the monetization of the grieving process. I also tend to agree with them, but I don’t agree with putting online content behind pay walls, in general.

Similarly, they were critical of advertising on memorial Web sites. Some thought there shouldn’t be advertising, while others thought it should only be for charities.

I’m really interested to see how my interviews compare to interviews the rest of our group did, and when I find out, I’ll report back.