No change in obit policy (4/23/03)

After mine.

That's when The CR and The Dunkirk News and Sun can change their policy on obituaries.

A couple of weeks ago, the Fort Wayne newspapers joined the ever-growing club of benighted publications which have decided that the final printed news report of an individual's time on earth ought to be a matter of dollars and cents.

Actually, it's a matter of big dollars and little sense.

The dollars come from charges ranging from $50 to $100 for a full obituary in most metropolitan papers. When you add up the number of full obits in a given week, you are talking about serious revenue.

One editor we argued with earlier this year said his paper was raking in $300,000 a year from paid obits.

That's a lot of money, no matter how you slice it.

But it's nothing compared to the damage done to the newspaper's credibility.

Right now, I'm somewhere in Central Asia working with newspaper editors and publishers, trying to steer them to self-sufficiency and financial independence.

And one of the things I stress is the importance of separating news columns from those which are paid advertising.

When you sell your news columns as paid space, I tell them, you seriously undermine the credibility of everything else you report in that space. A "paid article" undermines the credibility of the article beside it which strives for completeness and journalistic objectivity.

So I don't feel very good about my American colleagues who are busily selling away the very credibility I'm trying to build on the other side of the world.

How is that credibility undermined?

Simple. If someone can buy space which looks like a news story and completely control the content, how can the rest of the news content be taken seriously.

In simpler terms, if someone's paid obituary lists their pets among their survivors, how can the news story in the next column over be taken seriously?

It's all very cheesy, and it's a reflection of the money-driven newspaper chains at work. After arguing with one colleague about the issue over dinner, he answered with a single figure: $300,000. That's how much his paper grossed in paid obits each year.

For a paper like The CR or the News and Sun, of course, it would be dramatically different. But still, the numbers are large.

Do the math. If The CR averages three obits per day and is able to get away with something like $50 per obit, that tallies up to something like $50,000 a year in new revenues with not a nickel of added costs.

But it's not going to happen.

Obituaries are, at the most fundamental level, news. That gets us in trouble sometimes when we report the news warts and all. But it's what obituaries are all about: Telling about a death to people who didn't know about a death.

That's the news.

But when it's given over to advertising, the facts of the situation disappear. Control is handed over to the folks paying the bill. And the primary mission of the newspaper — to tell the news — is subverted.

So, for now, we continue to watch our big city cousins blunder into what we believe to be serious mistakes about what the mission of a newspaper should be.

And as for us? Well, watch for a change in obit policy after mine. No sooner.[[In-content Ad]]