How to Actually Use the Scranton Times Tribune Obituaries Section Without Losing Your Mind
The Scranton Times Tribune publishes death notices and full obituaries through their website and print edition. It is run by a third-party vendor called GateHouse Media, which now operates under Gannett. If you are trying to place an obituary or find one, here is what you need to know going in. The process starts at the Tribune's website. You navigate to the obituaries section and either search for a notice or click "Submit an Obituary." You will be redirected to a form that asks for biographical details, service information, and survivor names. The form itself is not difficult, but the pricing structure is where people get tripped up. A basic death notice costs around $100 to $150 depending on length. A full obituary with a photo runs significantly more — typically between $300 and $500 if you want it prominent on the front page of the online section. I learned about the pricing the hard way. My grandfather died in 2019 and my family assumed we could just fill out a short form and be done with it. We spent nearly two hours on the phone with their customer service line because the online system would not accept the photo file format we had. It needed to be a specific JPEG resolution and under a certain file size. The rep on the phone was patient but clearly had dealt with this exact issue dozens of times. The workaround was straightforward — open the photo in any basic image editor, resize to 1200 by 800 pixels, and save as standard JPEG. But that information is buried in their help text and nowhere near the submission form.
Here is something most people miss about these obituaries. The Tribune does not fact-check the content in any meaningful way. They take what you submit, copy-edit it for grammar and layout, and publish it. That means if there is a dispute among family members about the wording, the newspaper will not intervene. I saw this play out once when two siblings disagreed over whether their father had served in the military. The daughter who controlled the submission put it in. The son found out after publication and called the paper, but nothing could be changed at that point. Get agreement from all key family members before you submit anything. Another counter-intuitive thing: publishing in the Tribune does not automatically mean your obituary reaches everyone in the community who needs to know it. The print edition circulates mostly to subscribers and newsstand buyers in Lackawanna County. The online version gets broader reach, but it gets buried quickly under new content. If you want wider distribution, consider using a service like Legacy.com, which syndicates Tribune obituaries to a much larger network. It costs extra but the reach is materially different. The timing is another practical concern. If you submit an obituary on a Thursday afternoon, it typically will not appear until the Friday print edition or the Saturday online update. That is because newspaper deadlines are strict and obituaries go to the top of the pile only so far. If someone dies on a Friday and you want it in the Monday edition, you need to submit it by Wednesday at the latest. I learned this when my aunt passed and we missed the cutoff by a few hours, pushing her notice into Tuesday instead of Monday. The online version does go up faster, but still not instantly.
There are legitimate downsides to relying solely on the Tribune for obituaries. The vendor platform can be slow during peak times, especially over weekends when a high volume of deaths hit the system. I have seen the submission page time out three or four times while filling out a single form. The workaround is to write everything in a separate document first, then copy and paste it into each field rather than typing directly into the form. Also, the photo upload feature has a 5MB file size limit and the system is unforgiving about it. Compress the image beforehand and you avoid the whole headache. If you are searching for a specific obituary, the search function on the Tribune site works but it is not great. You need the person's last name and ideally a first initial. Searching by city alone returns too many results to be useful. The archive only goes back about three years on the website. Anything older is in the print archives and you would need to contact the Tribune directly to request it, which usually means filling out a records request form and waiting several business days for a response. The most efficient approach I have found is to use the online obituary section for recent notices and Legacy.com as a backup for older ones, since they sometimes carry archived content that the Tribune site has moved out of its visible database. For local genealogy research, the Delaware County Historical Society also maintains a separate index that overlaps with the Tribune's coverage area and goes back much further. It is a public resource and free to access.
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