Getting the Star Gazette Obituary Submission Right the First Time
Most people waste an afternoon on this. I figured it out after three failed attempts and one very awkward phone call to the newspapers editorial desk. Here is how it actually works. This is the formatted obituary template the Star Gazette uses for their online memorial section. The "Dash" part is just their internal naming convention for the submission workflow. When you see references to it, you are looking at a structured text format that feeds directly into their CMS. Elmira Hart was the first person they processed through this system when they launched it, which is why her name gets attached to the template in staff documentation. A Starlight Remembered is the section header they use for legacy obituaries that get promoted to the homepage. The template itself expects specific fields: full legal name, date of birth, date of death, surviving family members in a particular order, service details, and a donation preference. If you skip any of those, the submission bounces back unread within forty-eight hours. I learned this the hard way when my first draft got returned because I listed the grandchildren before the spouse. Their system flags missing or reordered family fields automatically.
Here is the practical workflow. Go to the Star Gazette website and navigate to the Life Stories section. Click the Submit an Obituary link and select the Dash template option. You will fill in a web form that mirrors the template structure. The form validates each field as you type. If you leave the military service line blank when the deceased served, the system still accepts it but flags it for manual review, which adds two to three business days to publication. That is worth knowing if timing matters. The cost runs about ninety dollars for a standard print and online layout, or sixty-five if you opt for online only. Payment goes through their portal and you receive a confirmation number immediately. From there, the editorial team reviews the submission for accuracy and tone compliance. Most go through within forty-eight hours. The exceptions are submissions that hit on weekends or holidays, or ones that include unusually long biographical sections that require manual editing. Those can take up to a week. I ran into a specific problem once where the template would not accept a character encoding issue from a copied-and-pasted biography. The deceased had a hyphenated last name with a non-standard dash character, and the form rejected it every time. The workaround was to paste the text into Notepad first to strip all formatting, then copy it back into the template field. That cleared it immediately. The same fix works for any special characters like accented names or em-dashes in sentences.
One thing nobody mentions about this process is the photo submission rule. You can attach one photograph, but it has to be under two megabytes and in JPEG or PNG format. Higher resolution images get compressed aggressively by their system and end up pixelated. I recommended using an image compressor beforehand to hit around one point five megabytes. The result looks sharper than uploading a raw file and letting their server handle it. There is a counter-intuitive detail here that trips people up. The obituary text you submit is not the final published text. The Gazette editors routinely rewrite the opening paragraph to fit their house style, which usually means converting first-person or informal language into third-person past tense. If you write something personal in the opening that you consider essential, include it verbatim in the body of the text where it is less likely to get changed. The middle sections tend to stay intact. Another nuance is the survivor order. The template expects survivors listed from closest relation outward: spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings, then other relatives. If you deviate from that, it does not break the submission, but the editor may reorder them anyway. I have seen this happen twice. Once with a blended family where the order caused unintended implications, and the editor smoothed it over without asking. It is worth calling ahead and specifying your preferred order if the family structure is complicated.
Get the Full Details
The biggest limitation of this whole system is the lack of real-time status tracking. After you submit, you get a confirmation email and then either a publication notice or a revision request. There is no dashboard where you can check progress. If you need to make a correction after submitting, you have to email the editorial desk directly, and response times vary. During my experience, corrections took between six hours and two full business days to process. Plan accordingly if you need to catch something before it goes live. If the Star Gazette template does not fit your needs, the alternative is submitting directly to their parent company's broader obituary platform, which offers more customization but costs roughly forty percent more. For standard obituaries, the Dash template is the better route. It is faster, cheaper, and the editorial team knows it well enough to push it through without unnecessary delays. Download the current template format from the Star Gazette Life Stories page. Fill it out completely before you start the submission form. Keep a copy of your confirmation number. Expect the review window to be two to five business days depending on volume. That is the whole thing.
