Working With the St Cloud Times Obituary Submission System
The St Cloud Times runs one of the more functional death notice and obituary workflows in central Minnesota. If you are trying to submit a notice and want it to actually look decent without spending four hours on it, here is how the process works and where it trips people up. First, the terminology matters more than you might think. The paper draws a hard line between a "death notice" and an "obituary." A death notice is basically a factual placeholder — name, age, date of passing, surviving family, service details. It runs for a set price per line or per inch. An obituary is a longer, often paid-advertisement-style piece that can include photos, longer biographical text, and custom formatting. Both honor lives, but they are priced and produced completely differently. I have seen families accidentally order a death notice when they wanted the full obituary treatment, then discover the 300-word story they wrote gets truncated to three lines because that is what they paid for.
St Cloud Times Obits Honoring Lives Preserving Community Stories Through Death Notices
The submission itself goes through their online portal, which routes through a third-party platform called Legacy Solutions (formerly Legacy.com). You create an account, fill out the form fields, upload a photo if you want one, and select your layout options. The platform gives you a live preview before you pay, which is genuinely helpful. I typically walk people through this process in about 20 minutes if everything is in order. Here is where the practical complications show up. The photo upload requires specific dimensions — 600 by 400 pixels minimum, JPG or PNG, and under 5 megabytes. Most phones take photos at a much higher resolution, so you need to resize them first. If you do not, the submission either gets rejected or the system compresses it badly and your image comes out blurry in print. I use a simple free tool called PhotoScape on my computer to batch-resize photos before uploading. Takes about two minutes and saves you from a headache later. Another issue people run into is the deadline. The St Cloud Times generally requires obituaries to be submitted by 2 p.m. for next-day publication, but death notices sometimes have a slightly later cutoff. I do not recommend gambling on this. If you are unsure, submit by noon. I learned this the hard way once when a family was finalizing wording at 1:45 p.m. and the system locked them out of edits. They ended up running a bare-bones notice instead of the full piece they had written.
The pricing structure is another area where beginners get caught off guard. Death notices run about $8 to $12 per inch depending on current rates, and you are charged for every inch of space the text occupies including the header line. An obituary with a photo typically starts around $150 to $250 for a basic layout, then scales up with additional images, columns, and boldface options. If you want a two-column layout with a large portrait photo, expect to pay significantly more. I always recommend calling the newspaper's advertising desk directly rather than relying on the automated quote in the system. The automated estimator tends to undercount by one or two inches on death notices because it does not always factor in the header and byline as separate charged units. A quick phone call can save you $20 to $40 and prevent a surprise charge on your final invoice. There is also the question of what gets published versus what gets approved. The St Cloud Times does not typically fact-check the biographical details you provide. They will verify the date of death and basic identifying information against public records, but they will not dig into whether someone actually attended a particular college or worked at a specific company for thirty years. That responsibility sits entirely on the submitter. I have seen errors slip through — wrong maiden names, misspelled surnames of surviving siblings — and once a notice went to print with the deceased person listed as still alive because the date field was left blank. These are fixable with a correction notice the next day, but the embarrassment factor is real and the correction itself costs extra. If you are working with tight timelines, the electronic submission is your only reliable option. Faxed or emailed obituaries sometimes get lost in internal routing, and I have watched people spend three days chasing down a submission that was never actually entered into the publication queue. Keep the confirmation email from Legacy Solutions. It includes a tracking number and a timestamp that proves you submitted on time.
Get the Full Details
The biggest downside to the current system is that it assumes you are submitting alone. If multiple family members are trying to edit the same obituary simultaneously, the platform does not handle concurrent editing well. One person's changes can overwrite another's. I recommend designating a single point person to handle the entire submission process rather than letting everyone chip in edits through the portal. It is cleaner and reduces the chance of something getting lost in translation. For local historians or genealogists who want to research past notices, the St Cloud Times archives go back to the early 2000s through their digital archive, but full-text search on older notices requires a subscription or an in-person visit to the library reference desk. The free online archive only goes back a few years. If you need records from before 2015, plan accordingly.
