Navigating the Post Crescent Obituary Process When You Are Not Thinking Clearly
The Post-Crescent in Appleton runs obituaries through a fairly standardized system, but the details matter more than most people realize until they are standing at their kitchen table at 11pm with a spreadsheet open and a grieving family group chat blowing up. The paper accepts obituaries through their online portal at postcrescent.com/obituaries, and you can also call their advertising office to submit by phone. Both routes work, though the online submission gives you a preview and a confirmation number, which you will need if something goes wrong. Here is how the costs actually break down. A standard obituary in the Post-Crescent runs about $25 to $40 flat for the first 25 lines, then roughly $1.25 to $1.50 per additional line depending on whether you are running it in print only or both print and their digital archive. A typical obituary sits somewhere between 150 and 300 words, which translates to maybe 12 to 25 lines. That puts most families in the $50 to $120 range for a single publication. If you run it for three consecutive days, which some families do, multiply that accordingly. They also offer a memorial ads section that is cheaper per line but doesn't carry the same editorial weight. Pick the right format before you start writing, because switching mid-process means starting over with your copy. The deadline is 3pm Central Time for same-day processing, and if you miss that window your piece rolls to the next business day. I learned this the hard way in 2019 when my mother's colleague's husband died on a Thursday afternoon and we scrambled to get the obituary in before the Friday print deadline. We missed it by about twenty minutes because we were waiting on a death certificate number the funeral home hadn't sent yet. The piece ran Saturday instead. Some people wanted it in Friday's paper. That mattered to the family more than anyone outside their living room probably understands.
What most people don't know is that the Post-Crescent does not fact-check biographical details the way a newsroom fact-checks a reporting piece. They trust the family to provide accurate dates, names, and affiliations. If you put the wrong birth year, it stays wrong unless you call and correct it before the paper goes to print. After publication, corrections go through a separate process and may not appear in the same format. Always triple-check dates against the actual death certificate or Social Security card, not just the funeral home summary sheet, because those sometimes contain typos. There is a specific workflow that works better than winging it. Get the essential facts first: full legal name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence at death, surviving family members, and predeceased relatives. Then write the life summary. After that, add service details with time, date, location, and whether it is public or private. Finally, include memorial donation suggestions if the family wants them. Put the service information last because that is what most readers scan for, and getting the emotional content right requires a different headspace than getting logistics right. Photos cost extra, usually around $25 to $50 depending on size and placement. The Post-Crescent accepts JPEG and PNG files, but they need to be at least 300 DPI for print quality. I have seen too many families send me blurry phone snapshots taken in dim lighting. They look fine on a screen and terrible in print. Take a photo in daylight, full resolution, and save it as a separate file before you do any editing. A slight brightness adjustment is fine. Applying a filter or cropping aggressively will make the printed version look worse, not better.
One counter-intuitive thing about obituaries in papers like the Post-Crescent: longer is not better, and neither is shorter. The sweet spot is between 200 and 400 words. Anything under 150 words reads like a notice, not a tribute. Anything over 500 words gets edited down by the staff anyway, often in ways that strip out the details you actually wanted to keep. They will cut transitions, remove qualifying phrases, and compress stories to fit column width. If you want specific anecdotes preserved, write them concisely within the 200-to-400-word range and submit them yourself rather than letting an editor shape them. Another detail that causes real problems: listing survivors in the correct order and with the correct names. The Post-Crescent follows a standard convention—spouse first, then children, then grandchildren, then parents, then siblings—but local families sometimes have non-traditional structures. Blended families, estranged relatives, chosen family. The newspaper will publish what you give them. There is no gatekeeping on family structure. But if you leave someone out intentionally due to a difficult situation, make sure every person who will see the paper has had prior notification. I worked with a family in Neenah once where the obituary listed only the mother's side of the family, and the father's sister found out through the newspaper rather than from her own brother. That created a situation that lasted years. The digital version of the obituary stays on postcrescent.com indefinitely, which is valuable. The print version appears in that day's paper and possibly the next day's archive. If you want something searchable years later, rely on the digital version. If you want something physical for a memorial service program or a framed copy, order the printed clipping separately from the obituary desk. They can provide it for a small fee, usually around $5 to $10.
Get the Full Details
One limitation of the Post-Crescent system that people run into: they do not accept contributions to charities directly through the obituary form. If you want donation information, you list the charity name and a link or address, but the paper does not facilitate the transfer of funds. Families sometimes assume they can set up a direct donation page through the obituary platform. They cannot. You need to create a separate fundraising page through a third-party service and include the URL in the obituary text instead. If the person who died did not live in the Fox Valley area but had family connections there, the Post-Crescent will still publish the obituary. They do not require the deceased to have been a resident. What matters is that a family member or the funeral home is submitting it and that the information is accurate. Some families use this to reach a broader network when the death occurred in a different state but the extended family remains in the area. The most practical advice I can give, written after doing this enough times to know where the friction points are: draft the obituary before you call the newspaper. Have the final text ready, the photo selected and properly sized, the payment method prepared, and the service details confirmed with the funeral director. The actual submission takes about ten minutes if nothing goes wrong. It takes about forty-five minutes if you are scrambling for information. Grief makes even simple tasks feel impossible, so do as much preparation as you can while your head is still clear enough to handle the logistics.
For anyone working through this right now, the Post Crescent obituary desk can be reached at (920) 636-4700 during business hours. Their online form walks you through each section, and you can save your progress and return to it later. Use that feature. There is no penalty for taking your time with the draft, and there is no advantage to rushing it through in one sitting.
