Obituaries in different “world” – What I learned from the “World of Obituaries”
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.