What's Actually Changing in Obituaries Now
I've been reading the NYT obituary section for years, mostly out of habit. The thing nobody talks about is how much the format itself has shifted. It's not just that people are living longer. The way we write about death has changed in ways that matter practically. The first trend is the collapse of the standard template. For decades, obituaries followed a rigid pattern: birth, education, career highlights, survivors, funeral details. You'd finish it in under four hundred words and nobody questioned it. Now I'm seeing pieces that run eight hundred words with personal anecdotes woven throughout. The newspaper's editorial standards allowed more room after 2019, which opened the floodgate. The second trend is specificity. People used to write "he was a loving husband and father." Now you get exact details: the name of the elementary school he taught at for thirty-two years, the specific jazz club where his wife proposed to him, the fact that he collected vintage typewriters and fixed them in his garage on Sundays. These details take longer to compile. I've spent an afternoon calling three cousins just to confirm the name of a dog that mattered more than some mentioned board positions.
The third trend is the inclusion of failure and struggle. Older obituaries smoothed everything over. Career setbacks, divorces, health battles — all edited out. The current batch includes them matter-of-factly. One recent piece I read spent a full paragraph on a bankruptcy in the late nineties that the person rebuilt from. Not framed as tragedy. Just framed as part of the arc. The fourth trend is the use of voice. Some families now request that the obituary sound like the person who died, which means quoting them directly or adopting their cadence. I've seen this done well and badly. When it's done well, you can tell within the first sentence who the person was. When it's done badly, it reads like a caricature written by someone who barely knew them. The fifth trend is digital-first adaptation. More obituaries now include links to memorial pages, QR codes pointing to photo albums, and instructions for how to make donations in lieu of flowers. The physical newspaper version is shorter. The online version is where the real content lives now. This split creates a problem: the print version sometimes feels incomplete when read alone.
How to Write One That Actually Works
Start with the facts first, not the feelings. I know that sounds backward, but here's why it matters. When you're writing about someone you care about, your instinct is to lead with emotion. The reader needs context before they can absorb the emotional weight. Put the basic timeline upfront: born when and where, what they did, who they're survived by. Then layer in the color. Here's a problem I ran into recently that most people don't anticipate. A family sent me a draft that had already been published on a local newspaper website six months earlier. They wanted a new version for the NYT because the person's career had advanced significantly since then. The issue was that the old version contained a specific detail about a business venture that had since fallen apart. Updating it meant rewriting three paragraphs just to remove that reference. The workaround was to cross-reference the person's LinkedIn history and corporate filings to verify what was still accurate versus what should be left out entirely. Took about forty-five minutes of research. Worth it to avoid printing something false. Don't list every achievement. This is counter-intuitive for people used to resumes. An obituary is not a CV. Pick three to five things that defined the person and elaborate on them. The rest belongs on a memorial page. If you include everything, the piece becomes unreadable and nobody finishes it.
Get the Full Details
Get the survivor count right. I cannot stress this enough. I've seen obituaries list "survived by his wife, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren" when the person actually had no grandchildren. Or listed a former spouse who predeceased them. These errors get caught by fact-checkers at major publications, but smaller outlets often don't have that layer. Verify names, relationships, and dates against official records when possible. Marriage certificates, census data, and birth records are publicly accessible in most states. The tone should match the publication you're submitting to. The NYT expects a certain formality. Regional papers are more flexible. Humor is acceptable in some outlets and unacceptable in others. I learned this the hard way when a submitter wrote a lighthearted obituary for a community paper that was rejected because the editor felt it "diminished" the subject. The same piece was accepted by another paper two weeks later. Context matters enormously. If you're working with limited information, admit it rather than filling gaps. There's a temptation to add plausible-sounding details when you're unsure. Don't. "Little is known about his early years" is better than inventing a childhood you're guessing at. Readers can tell when information is fabricated. It undermines trust in the entire piece.
One final note on timing. Obituaries have a window. They lose relevance quickly, usually within two to three weeks of publication. After that, they become archival content with minimal traffic. If you're waiting for family members abroad to contribute stories, set a hard deadline. I usually suggest fourteen days from the date of passing. Anything longer and the piece risks being stale before it prints.
