How to Work With the Pgh Post Gazette Obituaries System
I spend a lot of time helping families and funeral homes navigate local obituary publishing, and the Pgh Post Gazette setup is about average for regional newspapers. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done if you know where the buttons are and what the editorial team actually cares about. Let me walk through how this works in practice. The site lives at pghpostgazette.com, and the obituaries section sits under their local news umbrella. You can search by name, date range, or funeral home. The search function is basic — it indexes full names and sometimes key phrases from the body copy, but it will miss nicknames and maiden names unless the family included them. If you're doing genealogy research and an ancestor doesn't show up, try dropping the middle initial or looking at the print PDF instead of relying on the search bar alone. For submissions, the Gazette has moved online. You can file an obit through their website or email it to the classifieds desk. They charge by the inch for print placement, and the digital-only option runs significantly less. As of my last quote, a standard four-column obituary around two inches tall ran roughly $180 to $220 depending on length. Digital-only was about $40 to $60 for the same piece. These numbers shift with inflation and newspaper revenue models, so always call the classifieds desk for current rates before you commit to a draft.
Here is the part most people get wrong: the word count limit. The Gazette typically caps printed obituaries at around 250 words for the standard rate. Every word beyond that gets charged at a per-word overage rate, and editorial will trim or reject pieces that run significantly long. I had a client submit a 400-word obit last year that included three full paragraphs of volunteer history and a list of twelve grandchildren by name. I had to cut it down to 260 words before submission. The workaround was merging the sibling names into a single survivor line and removing the organization memberships — those details belong on the live digital page, not the print version. Print pays per inch, and nobody reads past the first two paragraphs anyway.
What Actually Works When Submitting
Start with the essential facts: full name including any maiden or nickname used in daily life, age, city of residence at the time of death, date of death, and surviving family members. Then add service details — where the funeral or memorial is held, what time it starts, and whether visitation precedes the ceremony. After that, the biographical paragraph. Keep it tight. Three to five sentences maximum for print. Photo files need to be at least 300 DPI and under 5 MB. The Gazette accepts JPEG and PNG. TIFF works too but slows down the layout process and occasionally causes formatting delays on their end. One thing I have learned the hard way: always include a phone number or email on the submission form. Not your own — a family contact who will be available during business hours. The editor calls back when there is a question about a name spelling, a missing dates, or whether a particular military honor can be listed. If nobody picks up, the obit gets delayed or published with a placeholder note. I once lost a same-day publication because the only contact number was a cell phone with voicemail, and the editor left three messages that went unheard. That obit ran two days late. Two days late in obituary terms feels like forever, especially when people are trying to send flowers to the wrong address because the service location was unclear.
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Technical Quirks and Edge Cases
The search index does not always update in real time. If you publish an obit today, it may not appear in search results for six to twelve hours. The site crawls on a schedule, not instantaneously. If someone is actively looking for a recent death notice and cannot find it, tell them to check the "Most Recent" page directly instead of running a search. That page refreshes more frequently than the full text search. There is also a formatting issue with military service notation. The Gazette uses standard abbreviations — "U.S. Army," "Vietnam Veteran," "Korean War" — but they do not automatically apply veteran iconography to the digital rendering. If the family wants the flag graphic next to the name on the web page, you have to explicitly request it in the submission notes. Otherwise, the military service line just appears as plain text within the body. It is a small detail, but families notice when the online display does not match what they expected. Funeral home accounts work differently from individual submissions. If you are a funeral director filing multiple cases per week, request a batch submission portal login. The standard form is built for one obit at a time, and entering the same funeral home details repeatedly wastes fifteen to twenty minutes per file. The account system stores your agency information so you only fill in the deceased-specific fields. I switched three funeral homes to batch accounts last year and cut their average submission time from about eight minutes per obit down to roughly three minutes.
What This System Does Not Do Well
The obituary section lacks advanced filtering. You cannot sort by funeral home, by service date, or by whether a photo is attached. The archive goes back roughly five years on the live site, but anything older than that usually requires a request to the newspaper's records desk, and response times range from two business days to two weeks. If you are doing serious historical research, the Pittsburgh Archive at Carnegie Library is a better starting point. They have microfilm going back much further and staff who know how to pull physical copies. Another limitation: the Gazette does not support live-stream links in obituaries. If a family is broadcasting a funeral service on YouTube or a dedicated platform, that URL will not appear in the published piece. You can include it in the digital-only version if you email the editor directly, but even then, some editors consider it a separate advertisement rather than part of the obituary content. I have had pieces with live-stream links pulled after publication on two separate occasions. Just put the stream details on the funeral home website instead and reference it verbally in the obit text if needed.
A Practical Checklist Before You Hit Submit
Verify every name against the death certificate. Spelling errors in surviving family names are the single most common reason for revision requests, and correcting them after publication requires a separate written request. Check that the service time and location match what the family confirmed with the officiant. Make sure the photograph file is compressed appropriately — oversized files get rejected by the CMS uploader. Include the exact wording the family wants for any religious or organizational affiliations. Newspapers will not take creative liberty with "Church of the Nativity" versus "Our Lady of Nazareth Church" even if they mean the same building. Get it right the first time. Keep a copy of the submitted text with a timestamp. The Gazette does not always send confirmation emails, and the online submission portal does not reliably store draft histories. If something goes wrong on their end, having your original file makes the correction process much faster. The whole process is straightforward once you know the constraints. The Pgh Post Gazette obituary system is not state of the art, but it covers the legal requirements, reaches the local audience, and provides a permanent digital record that survives beyond the print run. For most families in the Pittsburgh area, that is exactly what they need.
