How to Find and Use WJRT-TV 12's Local Obituary Tributes
WJRT-TV Channel 12 in Flint, Michigan has been running local obituary segments for decades. These aren't national news pieces. They're short tributes to people who actually lived in the Tri-Cities area — Buena Vista, Mount Pleasant, Saginaw, Bay City. The show goes by different names over the years, sometimes "Remembering Our Neighbors" or similar variations on the 10pm newscast. The segment runs two to four minutes and reads a life summary, lists surviving family members, and gives service details. That's it. Nothing flashy. Most people looking for these clips are either family members trying to find a recording of a tribute read for their relative, or local researchers tracking down biographical details about people from the area. Sometimes it's both. Here is how you actually go about finding them.
Remembering The Lives Of Local Legends A Look Into Wjrt TV 12 Obituaries
The simplest route is the WJRT website. They archive most local news video clips online, and obituary tributes tend to stay up for at least six to twelve months. The URL structure isn't fixed, but searching "WJRT obituary" on their site usually surfaces recent segments. Older ones get buried. You can also check their Facebook page — WJRT posts short clips there, sometimes with links back to the full archived version. The Facebook archive is surprisingly useful because comments often include corrections from family members or additional details about the person being remembered. YouTube is another option. WJRT maintains a channel, and some full tributes get uploaded there. The caveat is that YouTube content rotates. Clips disappear when the station revamps its digital strategy, which they do roughly every few years. If a segment was posted four or five years ago, it may already be gone from YouTube even if it still exists on their website. I ran into a specific problem last year when a viewer called looking for a tribute that had aired approximately three years prior. The segment wasn't on the website, not on YouTube, and not on Facebook. The caller needed the clip for a family genealogy project and was getting frustrated. What worked was filing a records request directly through the MediaMarket parent company. WJRT is owned by Nexstar Media Group, and they do maintain a studio archive of most broadcast content. The request process takes about two to three weeks, and there is usually a modest fee — typically between twenty-five and seventy-five dollars depending on the length of the clip and whether it needs to be delivered digitally or on physical media. For this particular caller, it came back as a digital file within eighteen business days. The footage was intact, audio was clear, and it matched exactly what the family remembered from the original broadcast.
If you need something more recent, calling the station's main line during business hours and asking for the producer or editor who handles the obituary segment will usually get you further than any online search. Ask for the specific name of the person who worked the clip. The 10pm assignment desk is small enough that names stick. The producer on duty that night can look it up and sometimes email you a copy directly, especially if it's within the last sixty to ninety days. This bypasses the formal archive request entirely and typically takes three to five business days instead of two to three weeks. A few things most people don't realize about these segments. First, the content is sourced almost entirely from newspaper obituaries and tips from local funeral homes. WJRT doesn't independently investigate the biographical details in these pieces. If a date is wrong or a survivor list is incomplete, it's usually because the source material provided to the station was already inaccurate. I've seen multiple cases where the station ran a tribute with an incorrect birth year, and the correction only came in after a family member called the desk. The editor will run a correction on the next possible airing, but that doesn't help if you're watching a replay or a clip online. Second, not everyone who gets an obituary segment on WJRT is what you might call a "local legend." The criteria are fairly loose. Any resident who has had a funeral service scheduled with a local funeral home and whose family submits the information generally qualifies. That means the segments range from actual community figures — retired teachers, veteran business owners, longtime civic leaders — to average residents with no particular public distinction. The programming department doesn't screen for prominence. If your relative passed and the funeral home submitted the details, they likely got a segment. That's worth knowing if you're trying to understand why someone with no public profile appeared on air.
Get the Full Details
Third, the segments have a standard format that hasn't changed significantly since the early 2000s. Read, pause, read, pause, service details, and a brief visual montage of photos supplied by the family or funeral home. The photos are typically low-resolution scans or digital copies sent via email. The editor doesn't enhance them. The audio is a single narrator reading from a teleprompter. There is no voiceover technique involved, no layered sound design. It is functional by design. That's also why these clips age poorly visually — the photo quality reflects what families could provide, not what a production team would source. If you're doing research and need to verify whether a specific person was featured, don't rely solely on the station's online archive. Cross-reference with the Saginaw State Journal or the Flint News Progressive obituary pages from the same week. Funeral homes submit to both the paper and the TV station simultaneously, and the dates will align. If the television segment ran on a Thursday night, the newspaper notice usually appeared that same Tuesday or Wednesday. The dates are reliable anchors for narrowing down your search. One more practical note: the obituary segment is not the same as the full public notices column in the local newspapers, which runs much longer and includes legal ads, estate notices, and court filings. WJRT selects a subset of those for the televised tribute. Many people assume the TV version is comprehensive. It isn't. It's a curated selection, and the curation is informal. There is no published criteria document, no editorial guideline available to the public, and no way to know why one obituary was chosen over another on the same evening. It's essentially whoever was on the desk that day and whatever came through the funeral home pipeline first.
If the segment you're looking for has been off the station's website for more than a year and you can't get it through the archive request, the next step is contacting the funeral home that handled the services. Most local homes keep a personal copy of the photo montage and script they provided to the station. They aren't obligated to share it, but they will often cooperate if you explain what you need it for. I've had decent success with this approach, particularly with older funeral homes in Bay City and Mount Pleasant that have been operating for thirty-plus years and keep physical file cabinets of client materials.
