Death Notices Are More Complicated Than They Look
I spend too much time helping people submit death notices through the Post Bulletin system. It sounds straightforward — someone dies, you write something, it goes in the paper. But the actual process has enough wrinkles that I get messages from folks who have been stuck for days because of small mistakes they didn't realize they were making. The newspaper's online submission portal is dated, the guidelines are buried, and the grief component means people are often handling this while running on empty. That combination creates problems. Here's how the system actually works. The Post Bulletin is based in Jackson, Minnesota, and serves rural and small-town southwestern Minnesota. Their death notices are the traditional paid newspaper format — not to be confused with obituaries, which are editorial pieces written by staff. Death notices are paid advertisements submitted by families or funeral homes. You go through their online submission portal at postbulletin.com, fill out the form, select your word count tier, pay the fee, and wait for confirmation. The standard rate structure runs roughly $15 to $25 for the first few lines, then per-line charges after that. A typical notice runs between 75 and 150 words depending on what you include. The tricky part is that the portal doesn't validate anything until you hit submit. I learned this the hard way when I was helping a family member finalize a notice for their father. I filled out every field carefully, selected the right paragraph block, even double-checked the date of death against the death certificate. Went to submit. Got an error message that just said the submission couldn't be processed. No details, no guidance. Called the newspaper desk directly. Turns out the funeral home name had to match exactly what was registered in their system — the family had been using a memorial service company name instead of the licensed funeral home name, and the portal rejected it silently. The workaround was to call the classifieds desk during business hours and have them manually accept the notice over the phone. It added about two hours to the timeline, but we got it in before the Monday edition deadline.
Word choice matters more than most people expect. Newspapers like the Post Bulletin have style preferences that aren't always documented. They prefer "died" over "passed away" in the formal notice text, though they'll run either. They want full names — first and last, no nicknames unless the person was universally known by one. Dates should follow MM/DD/YYYY format. The portal will accept other formats but the typesetter sometimes misreads them. I've seen "May 12, 1948" get reinterpreted as May 2014 by the automated layout software because the scanner confused the comma. Always use numbers. Survivor information is where most notices trip up. The standard format lists surviving family members in a specific order — spouse first, then children, then grandchildren, then parents if applicable. Siblings come after. I've seen families accidentally list deceased siblings in the "surviving" section, which creates an awkward situation that requires a correction notice. The Post Bulletin will run corrections but they charge extra and there's a publication delay. Prevention is cheaper. Double-check every name against the death certificate and any pre-planned obituary the funeral home may have drafted. If someone predeceased the deceased, list them in a separate "predeceased by" line rather than omitting them entirely. Most readers expect that line and its absence can look like an oversight. Photos add cost. Including a headshot or recently taken photo in the death notice runs an additional fee on top of the word count charge. The Post Bulletin accepts digital submissions in JPEG or PNG format with a minimum resolution of 300 DPI. If you upload a phone photo that's been resized for social media, it'll come out muddy in print. I once had a client submit a nice portrait that looked fine on screen and ended up grainy in the paper because it was originally a 72 DPI web image. The fix was resubmitting the original high-resolution file from the camera or scanning a physical print. Make sure you have the actual source file before you start the submission process.
Timing is critical and the deadlines are strict. The Post Bulletin typically runs death notices the day after submission if you meet the afternoon cutoff — usually around 2 PM central time for next-day placement. Weekend submissions may not appear until Tuesday or Wednesday. If the notice is for a Friday or Saturday publication and you submit Thursday after 2 PM, it could slip to the following Monday. There's no guaranteed expedite option. Call the classifieds department directly if you're working with an unusually tight timeline from a funeral home. Sometimes they can bump a notice earlier if there's space, but they won't tell you this unless you ask. The digital extension of death notices is worth understanding. The Post Bulletin scans and posts paid death notices to their website, but the online version often differs from the print edition. They may truncate text, drop the photo, or change the layout entirely. Families sometimes submit a longer notice thinking it appears in full online and are surprised when only the first paragraph shows up. The online version is also searchable, which means distant relatives or old acquaintances can find it easily. That's a double-edged sword. Some families appreciate the wider reach. Others worry about privacy, especially if the deceased had complex family situations they didn't want exposed. You can request that the online version be limited to basic information only — name, dates, funeral service details — and keep the fuller biographical text in the print version alone. The newspaper will honor this request if you specify it at submission time. There's a growing trend toward memorial websites and digital-only tributes that compete with traditional death notices. I understand why people consider it. You can include multiple photos, video, guest books, and life stories at essentially no cost. Some families I've worked with have completely replaced print notices with online memorial pages shared via social media. That's a valid choice. But there are practical reasons the Post Bulletin death notice still matters in this community. Rural populations here skew older. Not everyone checks Facebook daily. The newspaper remains the primary way people in this area learn about deaths in their community. A death notice in the Post Bulletin reaches neighbors who wouldn't see it anywhere else. That's not nostalgia. It's the actual circulation data.
Get the Full Details
If you need to submit a death notice, here's what I'd actually recommend doing. Gather all the required information first — full legal name, date of birth, date of death, place of death, surviving family members with correct relationships, funeral home name exactly as registered, service details including date time and location. Then draft the text in a word processor before you touch the portal. Keep it between 100 and 130 words for the standard tier. Run it past at least one other family member before submitting. Check every date. Check every name. Call the Post Bulletin classifieds desk if you hit any errors or if the online form seems to hang. They're used to dealing with this under pressure and they'll work with you. Don't wait until the last possible hour to submit — the portal gets slow during peak hours and crashes occasionally. The fees change periodically so don't rely on old numbers. As of my last check, the standard death notice ran approximately $85 to $120 for a typical 100-word notice with one photo, but verify current rates on their website before you budget. Payment is processed online at submission and they accept major credit cards. You'll receive a confirmation email with a notice number — save that. If something goes wrong, that number is what the staff will need to locate your submission in their system. Grief makes everything harder than it needs to be. I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because I've watched competent people forget to include the funeral home phone number, submit the wrong date, or pick the wrong publication day because they were handling this while sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. Take a breath. Have someone help you proofread. And if the system gives you trouble, call the newspaper directly instead of spinning your wheels trying to fix it through the automated portal. It usually takes them five minutes to resolve whatever issue you're stuck on.
