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.