Obit Research

We have discovered that in England, people love their obituaries. Obits have long been large sources of traffic and readership for English newspapers. In contrast to the American style, obits originating in England can be saucy and/or sarcastic, depending on the author’s mood. The tone does not always have to be totally sympathetic or even kind, and the principles of detailed storytelling are usually prioritized higher than simply stating the facts and important events of a person’s life. Take for example the beginning of this obituary of Gavin Hodge, a celebrity hair dresser:

Gavin Hodge, who has died aged 65, was one of the first celebrity hairdressers, and became known as much for his sexual conquests as for his skills with the scissors; his era was the 1960s and 1970s, when the crimper emerged from the shadows of the salon to become a sought-after man about town.

Also, here is an excerpt from the an obit written for British Manjor-General Ken Perkins:

There were some who thought that Perkins might have climbed higher were it not for his uncompromising nature: he was never afraid to go out on a limb or to ruffle feathers by questioning the official line.

Is this more honest style of obit reporting beneficial?

ED: Also take a look at Ming’s fine post on world obituaries, which includes a section about those in Britain.

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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