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.
(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.
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In honor of Halloween, I would like to bring you a truly morbid post by pointing out two interesting trends in the realm of death this week.
First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.
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As part of my obituary research I read an interesting study, “The Reporting of Grief”, by one newspaper of record for the U.S.: the New York Times.
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.
This past week I interviewed obituary writers in two different newspapers across the country, The Bradenton Herald in Bradenton, FL and the Greenville Sun in Greenville, TN. Both newspapers were mentioned in 2000-2001 by the Readership Institute as newspapers doing a good job providing obits to readers. I wanted to check what they are doing and how.
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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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Throughout the last few weeks our team of obituary researchers has been conducting open-ended interviews with acquaintances who, we believe, fall outside of Legacy.com’s traditional audience demographic.
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.
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