The Dying Obit Pages

My comments on this in a moment:

What Americans need right now is a good government-subsidized obituary.

You probably didn’t read the story – because what red-blooded American reads a newspaper anymore? – but apparently the nation’s newspapers, having already lost their editorial dominance to cable news and the Web, their sports coverage to fan sites, their classifieds to Craigslist, and their editorial pages to the blogosphere, are now under heavy assault on their last profitable redoubt: the obituary page.

The story, from the Wire Service That Shall Not Be Quoted, reports that a new study by Northwestern University finds that social networks and on-line memorials are increasingly taking the place of that old print stand-by. This, of course, is shocking news: given the average age of today’s typical newspaper reader, the obituary page is likely the first and only one they read over their bowls of stewed prunes.

Thus, and for good reason, the Northwestern researchers recommend that newspapers not cut back on either those pages or the staff who produce them. To that strategy, one can only say: fat chance.

Unfortunately, I had a recent experience with this. I wrote my father's obituary and had planned to run it in the local paper...until we found out what it was going to cost. Somewhere between $800 and $1,000 for a single day placement.

For about the same money we were able to get an online memorial that would stay up for a year, would allow people to add their own comments, and included streaming video from the service which others around the country were able to watch live, and later via a link. The newspaper obit would have been there one day and that was it.

No contest.

Newspapers are dead. It's time to write the obit...and post it online.