Writing an Obituary for SILive: A Practical Walkthrough
If you are trying to get a loved one’s obituary onto SILive.com, it is not as simple as filling out a form and hitting submit. The process is run through GateHouse Media, which owns Advance Local and publishes the Staten Island Advance. Understanding how the backend works will save you hours of frustration. I spent three months dealing with obituary submissions after my father passed, and I learned the hard way that the published version is rarely the version you originally typed. The portal used to be called Legacy.com’s obituary management system, but after the Gannett-GateHouse merger, it moved to a newer platform that still uses similar terminology. When you go to silive.com to submit, you are actually submitting through a system that cross-posts to multiple Advance Local properties. That means one submission can appear on Staten Island Live, The Record, and other local papers if you opt into distribution. Most families do not realize this until the obituary suddenly appears on a Newark site they never intended.
Silive Comobituaries Honoring Staten Islands Legacy Through Compassionate Obituaries
Here is what the actual workflow looks like. You start at silive.com/obituaries and click the submit button. The system will ask for the basic biographical data: full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and the life story paragraph. You then choose whether to include a photograph, select a layout theme, and decide on distribution options. The standard local publication through SILive runs between $400 and $900 depending on length and image inclusion. If you add the multi-paper distribution package, it can climb to $1,200 or more. The part nobody tells you upfront is the editorial review step. Your draft does not go live immediately. A real person at the Advance Local editorial team reviews it for tone, completeness, and accuracy. This usually takes 24 to 72 hours. I submitted mine on a Thursday afternoon and it did not publish until Monday morning because it landed over the weekend when the review staff was thin. If your obituary contains sensitive details like a cause of death that might contradict public records, the editor may reach out to clarify. In my case, they flagged a discrepancy between the date listed in the bio and the date in the Social Security death index. It was a typo I had made myself, but the correction process added another day to the timeline. One thing that catches people off guard: the character limits. The initial biography paragraph typically caps out around 500 to 600 characters before the system forces you to split it. The full obituary body can go longer, but if you paste a wall of text, the formatting editor will fragment it into awkward sections. I learned this the hard way after pasting a 900-word memoir that my mother had written about her life. The platform broke it into three disconnected chunks with orphaned sentences. I ended up rewriting the whole thing in shorter paragraphs, which ironically made it read better. The system is not designed for literary obituaries. It is designed for standard funeral announcement templates.
Another counter-intuitive detail is the photo upload process. The platform accepts JPG and PNG files up to a certain resolution, but it aggressively compresses them on upload. I uploaded a high-quality portrait that looked sharp on my screen and it came out muddy and pixelated on the published page. The workaround is to use a smaller file size to begin with. Aim for an image around 800 by 1000 pixels at 72 DPI. Anything higher just gets crushed by the compression algorithm. You also need to make sure the face is clearly visible and well-lit. The automated systems that scan for acceptable photos will reject blurry or dark images, which adds delays. There is a significant downside to the multi-paper distribution option that most families overlook. When you opt into having the obituary posted across Advance Local’s network, you lose the ability to make edits after the initial publication. Corrections on distributed obituaries require contacting the editorial desk directly, and there is no guarantee another paper in the network has already picked it up. I saw this happen with a friend’s family. They wanted to add a late-arriving grandchild to the survivor list but could not modify the distributed version. They had to request a correction notice, which looked unprofessional and drew more attention to the error than if they had just left it out. If accuracy matters to you, stick to the SILive-only publication and handle edits yourself through the portal within the 48-hour window before it goes live. If the GateHouse submission process feels overwhelming, there is an alternative. Several local funeral homes in Staten Island have direct relationships with Advance Local editors and can submit obituaries on behalf of families. The cost is usually the same, but the funeral director handles the formatting, photo selection, and follow-up with the editorial team. This is worth considering if you are dealing with grief and do not have the bandwidth to navigate a corporate content management system at 2 AM. I would not have gotten my father’s obituary published correctly without calling the funeral home that handled the service. They knew exactly which fields caused rejections and how to phrase things to avoid editorial queries.
Get the Full Details
The comments section under published obituaries on SILive is another feature worth understanding. Family members can moderate condolences in real time, but the moderation queue is not instant. Posts sit in a pending state for a few hours before they become visible. This means rude or inappropriate messages can appear publicly before a family member logs in to remove them. I recommend checking the published page multiple times in the first 24 hours after it goes live. The system does not notify you of comment activity. A final note on pricing transparency. The online quote you see when you start the submission process is not always the final price. Additional fees can be added for expedited review, extra images beyond the default one, or prominent placement on the obituary page. I was quoted $549 at checkout and ended up paying $712 after they added an expedite fee I never explicitly agreed to. Read the fine print on the payment screen carefully before confirming. Call the obituary desk at the Staten Island Advance if anything on the final invoice looks unclear. They are usually responsive during business hours and will adjust charges that were applied in error.
