Writing Obituaries That Actually Work
I used to handle obituary submissions for the News Gazette for about four years before they started using a portal. Most people have no idea how much friction goes into getting one of these things published correctly. They think it is just writing a nice paragraph and hitting send. It is not. There are specific formatting requirements, legal considerations, and a lot of back-and-forth with funeral homes that most families never see. The basics are simple enough. You need the full legal name of the deceased, the date and location of death, a brief biography covering birth, family, career highlights, and community involvement. But the part everyone gets wrong is the tone calibration. Too cold and the family complains it reads like a police report. Too warm and the editor rewrites half of it to meet space constraints. The sweet spot is somewhere between a resume and a eulogy. Respectful but factual.
Remembering The Lives Of News Gazette Obituaries A Look Into The Human Experience
When I say the human experience, I mean something very specific. I mean the moment a grieving daughter sends you an obituary draft at 2:17 AM with a note saying her mother would want it "to sound like her." That is the actual work here. It is not just formatting dates and names. It is interpreting what the family wants the person to be remembered for, often when the family themselves are too raw to articulate it clearly. One edge case I dealt with involved a veteran whose family wanted his military service highlighted but also wanted to downplay the circumstances of his death because he had passed from complications of a long illness that he never discussed openly. The military honors section was straightforward, but the cause of death wording required about six phone calls between the funeral director, the family, and my editor before we landed on "passed away after a prolonged illness" rather than something more clinical. That kind of negotiation is built into every obituary. You just do not see it in the final printed version. Here is what I learned about the structural side that nobody tells you. The opening line matters more than anything else. Most newspapers use an inverted pyramid format for obituaries: lead with the death announcement, then biographical details, then survivor information. But the opening sentence should do double duty. It needs to state the facts while also establishing the tone. A standard template looks like this:
John Michael Thompson, 72, of Riverside, passed away peacefully on October 14, 2023, surrounded by his family. Born in Chicago on March 3, 1951, to Walter and Helen Thompson, he spent his childhood on the South Side before moving to Riverside with his family in 1965. That is the skeleton. The meat comes from what you include in the middle. And this is where most submissions fail. People either include too little detail, making the obituary feel hollow, or they include too much, filling it with every accomplishment and trip and hobby the person ever had. The average acceptable length for a standard News Gazette obituary is between 250 and 400 words. Going under 200 looks incomplete. Going over 500 usually gets cut by the editor or pushed to a paid longer-form section. A common pitfall is the survivor listing. There is a specific convention here. You list immediate family first in this order: surviving spouse, then children and their spouses, then grandchildren, then parents if still living, then siblings. If someone predeceased the person, you note that briefly. "Preceded in death by his father, Robert Smith, and his sister, Maria Chen." Do not omit people arbitrarily. Families notice. I have had two separate families call the newsroom to ask why an ex-spouse or a estranged sibling was left out. It happens more often than you would think.
Get the Full Details
Another thing that catches people off guard is the donation request. This is one of the most common formatting errors I see. The correct way to phrase it is: "In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the American Cancer Society, PO Box 1234, City, State ZIP." Including a website URL is sometimes acceptable but not always. The Gazette stopped accepting URLs in donation lines about three years ago because they caused formatting issues in the print. If you are submitting for a different paper, check their current policy. It changes without much announcement. Let me address the process itself since most people submitting their first obituary have no idea what happens after they send it in. Here is the typical workflow. You submit the draft along with a recent photograph to the designated email or portal. The newspaper's obituary editor reviews it for accuracy, tone, and compliance with their style guide. They may return it with questions or suggested edits. Once approved, it goes into the typesetting queue. Depending on the publication's circulation size, publication can take anywhere from 24 hours to five business days. During a busy period like late December or around major holidays, I have seen turnaround times stretch to seven days. If your timeline is tight because of a viewing or service date, flag that prominently in your submission and provide the exact date of the requested publication. There are some deeper nuances that only become obvious after you have reviewed hundreds of these drafts. One is the handling of nicknames. If the person was known by a nickname their entire adult life, the obituary should lead with their legal name but include the nickname parenthetically. "Margaret Anne O'Brien (known to everyone as Peggy)" works. Just saying "Peggy O'Brien died at age 68" will get returned because it does not match the legal death certificate information that the newspaper cross-references. They do this to avoid printing inaccuracies that could create legal problems down the line.
Another nuance is how to handle sensitive information. Divorces, non-traditional family structures, causes of death that are contentious, military discharges that were not honorable. None of these are required reading in an obituary. The family decides what to include. Your job as the writer or editor is to flag anything that could create a problem if printed without context. A brief note to the family like "This may invite questions from readers. Would you like to add a sentence of explanation?" goes a long way. It prevents follow-up calls and corrections, which are a headache for everyone involved. Photographs are a separate category of problem. The Gazette requires high-resolution images, ideally at least 300 DPI at the size they will print. Most people send phone camera photos that look fine on a screen but turn out muddy and pixelated in print. I spent an entire Tuesday in 2019 trying to help a family locate a scanned copy of their father's high school yearbook photo because every digital image they had was too small. They eventually found one at a cousin's house that was properly scanned. The lesson is straightforward. Have the photograph ready before you start writing. Do not treat it as an afterthought. A good obituary with a poor quality photo looks worse than a slightly less detailed obituary with a strong, clear image. Cost is another factor people rarely understand. Most local newspapers charge by the line or by the inch of column space. An average obituary runs about 10 to 15 inches. For the News Gazette, the rate I saw in my later years was approximately $12 to $18 per inch, meaning a standard obituary would cost between $120 and $270. Adding a photograph typically runs an additional $25 to $50. Memorial advertisements from funeral homes or organizations can run significantly higher, sometimes several hundred dollars for a full-page layout. These prices vary by market size and competition. If cost is a concern, shorter is always cheaper, and some papers offer a free basic obituary up to a certain word count if you submit through their online portal rather than calling in.
What I want to be honest about is the emotional toll this work takes on the people doing it. You read about people dying every single day. You see the worst and the best details of people's lives. You handle the raw grief of strangers and try to make it fit into 300 words on a newsprint page. After a while, you develop a certain emotional callous. It is not heartlessness. It is a professional boundary. But it is real and you should expect it if you plan to do this regularly. For families submitting their first obituary, the most practical advice I can give is to gather information before you start writing. Get the death certificate. Confirm exact dates, spelling of names, and locations. Talk to at least two family members about what the person was like. Not just the facts, but the actual person. The quirky habits, the favorite projects, the way they treated strangers. Those details are what separate a generic obituary from one that actually captures a life. The rest is just form filling. If you are looking for resources, the Gazette's editorial page hosts a basic obituary guide with examples and a FAQ section. It is not comprehensive but it covers the current policies and formatting requirements. For funeral directors managing multiple submissions, keeping a standardized information-gathering worksheet for each family speeds up the process considerably. I used a simple checklist covering name variations, vital statistics, surviving and predeceased family members, biographical highlights, service details, and donation information. It cut my average drafting time from about 45 minutes per obituary down to roughly 20 minutes once the initial information was collected.
The bottom line is that obituary writing is a small but important intersection of journalism, editing, and grief counseling. It requires technical precision and emotional awareness simultaneously. Most people underestimate how much of both are needed. If you approach it with respect for the process and the families involved, you will produce something that actually serves its purpose. Which is to say something that helps people remember.
