WNEM-TV5's Memorial Segments and How They Actually Work
If you grew up in the Tri-Cities area of Michigan and watched the evening news on WNEM-TV5, you probably remember their obituary remembrance pieces. They air occasionally, usually on weekends or around Memorial Day, and they're essentially photo slideshows with soft music while the anchor reads names of locals who've passed since the last episode. It sounds simple. The production side isn't as straightforward as it appears, and there are a few quirks that anyone who's actually tried to put something like this together will tell you about. The format is pretty standard for local TV. The station collects death notices from local newspapers, family submissions, and the funeral homes in the Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland area. The producers or the assignment desk editor cull through them to find folks who have no recent broadcast presence. They pull a headshot if one exists—usually from a driver's license file, a yearbook, or a photo a family member emails in. That photo gets keyed into whatever graphics package the station runs, typically something like Chyron or a lower-third template, and a voiceover anchor reads the name, age, and a short line about where they lived or what they did. The music is always generic royalty-free. I've heard the same two or three tracks cycle through over the years. It's never original composition, just stock audio licensed for broadcast. The entire segment runs maybe three to five minutes depending on how many names made the cut.
Here's the part nobody outside the station really thinks about. The legal clearance side is what actually eats your time. Every photo has to be cleared for broadcast use. If it came from a newspaper archive, you need confirmation that WNEM can use it. If it came from a family member, you need written permission or at least an email trail showing they're the relative and they're okay with it. I learned this the hard way back in 2019 when a producer pulled a photo from a local Facebook memorial page without checking. The station got a polite but firm takedown request from the deceased's daughter within twenty-four hours. We had to pull the segment mid-air and re-upload a corrected version. That cost us about forty-five minutes of on-air time and a pretty awkward conversation with the ombudsman. The workaround I ended up using for years was simple: create a standard family release form and keep a folder of pre-cleared newspaper archives. Most local papers like the Saginaw News and the Bay City Times have syndication agreements that allow TV stations to republish obituary photos with attribution. Get that in writing upfront from the paper's managing editor and you save yourself a ton of back-and-forth later. I started keeping a spreadsheet with the contact info for the photo desks at each paper so I wasn't digging for it when a segment was due. One counter-intuitive thing about these segments is that the most emotional ones are usually the coldest to produce. The anchor reading thirty names of people who died in the last six months isn't supposed to sound mournful. The network standards and practices department at NBC affiliates gets twitchy if the tone leans too heavy. It's treated as informational content, not a tribute special. So you'll hear the same flat, conversational delivery whether the person was a beloved teacher or someone who died in a car accident. That tonal consistency is intentional, even though it can feel jarring to viewers who expect more gravitas.
Another detail beginners miss: the order of names matters more than it should. Producers traditionally list people by date of death, oldest first, but families will call the desk if their loved one appears after someone they consider more prominent in the community. It's a weird pecking order that nobody writes down but everyone follows. I once had a former mayor's widow threaten to pull her family's submission because the son of a county commissioner was listed ahead of her husband. The fix was just swapping the two entries. Simple, but it took twenty minutes of recalculating timestamps on the edit board. The downside of this format is that it inherently favors people who leave behind clear paper trails. Veterans, long-term residents, people with published obituaries in the local papers—all of them show up. Someone who dies alone, has no family to submit a photo, or passes away without a formal obituary typically doesn't make the cut. The segment is only as complete as the records available to it, which means it's always going to underrepresent certain demographics. There's no technical workaround for that. It's a structural limitation of relying on public records and family initiative rather than proactive outreach. If you want to watch past episodes, WNEM-TV5 doesn't archive them on a dedicated page. Some air on their Facebook feed occasionally, and a few have shown up on YouTube uploads from local news aggregators, but there's no official repository. The best bet is to check their social media around late spring and early summer, or search the station's website news section for terms like "remembering" combined with the current year. They don't advertise these segments heavily, which is probably why so many people forget they exist until they see one.
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