Obit Research

Legacy.com, sponsor of our research project into obituaries and death notices, is taking steps to implement some of our recommendations.

And our team’s final report is now available for public release.

Here’s a breakdown of our key recommendations and a summary of Legacy’s responses.

Recommendation: Create a new Web site, Legacy Chronicles, geared to the interests of obituary fans.

Legacy’s response: While the company is not going to create such a site at this time, Legacy has launched a new section of its existing site called “Legacies,” to “address the needs of obituary fans and others who want to explore some of the rich life stories stored in our database,” said Hayes Ferguson, the company’s chief operating officer, in a written response to the class’s recommendations.

The new section organizes obituaries based on common themes, such as actors, poets or Major League Baseball players.

“We plan to expand the number of sites to commemorate people from many walks of life – teachers, police officers, firefighters, doctors, nurses, and others — and to integrate these inspiring sites into every affiliate Web site we host,” said Stopher Bartol, CEO of Legacy.com. “We think this will capture the spirit of what the Medill team envisioned, while expanding the concept’s scope and reach.”

Recommendation: Redesign and reposition Legacy.com to serve grievers and encourage the creation of online memorials to the deceased.

Legacy’s response: The company is making some changes to better serve this audience. For example, Legacy recently added a feature that allows users to “light a virtual candle” in honor of a loved one – an idea specifically suggested by the students. “We had talked about doing something like this for a while, but the Medill team made it clear that the time to do this is now,” Ferguson said.

Recommendation: Improve search technology on Legacy.com

Legacy’s response: By the end of 2010, “we will introduce a powerful new search and notification engine that will provide users easier and faster access to our affiliates’ content, through features such as full text keyword searches, advanced filtering and automated alerts,” Ferguson said. “We appreciate Medill’s focus on the power of our database and for urging us to make search a priority.”

Recommendation: Improve Legacy’s Web analytics system to better understand user behavior.

Legacy’s response: The students’ work “reinforced our desire to improve our Web analytics system to better understand user behavior,” Ferguson said. “We just hired a Web analytics manager to replace one who left Legacy.com shortly before the Medill project got underway.”

Recommendation: Capitalize on newspaper partnerships if possible – but be willing to go it alone if necessary.

Legacy’s response: “We remain steadfast in our belief that our success is intertwined with that of our newspaper affiliates,” Ferguson said. Bartol said that Legacy believes the newspaper relationships are the key to building a successful Web business for both Legacy and its newspaper affiliates.

“While we continue to expand the features and functionality of our memorial products, our emphasis is on building bridges from our newspaper affiliates to funeral homes, social media, and other places where people are paying tribute,” Bartol said. “Ultimately, we’ve found that what makes a memorial the most compelling is the volume and richness of input from those who knew or cared about the deceased, and its reach and accessibility to others. This is something that Legacy.com and its affiliates accomplish like no one else.”

You can read more about the latest developments, and Legacy’s complete response to our recommendations, on the Medill Web site.

As a kid, if you had the choice between a boring, old regular book with pages that only had pictures on them, or a POP-UP book with pictures that semi-literally jumped off the page, which would you choose? Thanks to the late Waldo Hunt, you had the choice.

A Chicago-native and World War II vet, Hunt first worked in advertising but lost interest in the field. Instead he became enchanted with a pop-up book from Czechoslovakia. He went on to design a pop-up ad for Wrigley’s gum, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Read more about Waldo Hunt’s life in his full obituary from the Los Angeles Times.

The eight of us sat around a long table on a sunlit September morning. There was brainpower at that table. Motivation. Imagination.

Then someone asked us what we were doing. Frankly, we didn’t know. And we still don’t know.

That’s not because this, the team leading the Medill School of Journalism’s Fall 2009 Digital Innovation Project, lacks direction. In fact, the breadth of options at our disposal, granted to us by our client legacy.com—one of the nation’s top-100 visited websites—is limitless.

Legacy is a Web giant that hosts obituaries for a mammoth chunk of America’s top newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. However, the company’s brand name is largely obscured—the vast majority of the site’s traffic comes via direct links to guestbooks for the deceased, online memorials and other content accessed through Legacy’s partner papers and not its homepage.

This project aims to grant the Legacy label greater exposure—to reinvent the editorial tone, content and design of legacy.com, so the site’s national obituary page will invite a wider audience.  To spur our creativity and find the appropriate strategy, we will be researching anything and everything about the art of obituary writing in American media.

What is the history of obituaries in the United States? Who writes them? Who reads them beyond those people who have lost a loved one? Is there a greater want or need for longer, feature style stories commemorating the dead? Is there a difference between American obituaries and those of other countries? Can obituaries of ordinary people be made interesting to an audience both near and far?

During the course of the next 2+ months, we will explore these questions and more.  We invite you to come along for the ride and learn with us.