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.