Working With The Telegram On Obituary Submissions
I spent about three years coordinating obituaries for a mid-sized funeral home in New England before realizing most of the friction came from treating newspaper submissions like an automated digital process. They are not. You submit, you wait, you call because something is wrong. Let me walk through how it actually works. Start by going to the newspaper's website and finding the obituaries section. For the Telegram, that means their local obituary page where they list recent notices. You can search by name, date of death, or family surname. The search function is basic but functional. Filter by date range if you need to track something specific over a week or two. When you need to submit one, you have two real paths. The first is going through a funeral director who already has a relationship with the paper. Funeral homes in this market have published with the Telegram for decades. They know the editor's name, they know what formats get rejected, and they know the timeline. If you have a funeral home handle this for you, the process typically takes 20 to 40 minutes of your time, mostly just providing the details and approving the draft. If you are trying to do this yourself without a funeral director, expect it to take closer to two hours because you will be calling, waiting on hold, and revising based on feedback you could have avoided.
The second path is calling the obituary desk directly. The number is listed on their website under classifieds or community notices. Hours vary by season. In summer they sometimes close early. Call between 9 AM and noon on a weekday for the best chance of reaching someone who can actually process your submission that day. Submissions received after 2 PM generally roll to the next available publication date, which matters because Friday obituaries carry more readership than Tuesday ones. The shocking truth most people do not know before starting this process is that newspapers do not publish exactly what you send. The Telegram, like most legacy papers, edits obituaries for space, tone, and compliance with their internal style guide. They will shorten phrases, remove certain religious language if it conflicts with the family's stated preferences, and they routinely trim lists of surviving relatives when the word count runs long. If you write a 400-word essay and submit it, expect roughly 200 words to appear in print. The digital version may retain more of your text, but even that is not guaranteed. My personal workaround for losing content in that edit was straightforward. I stopped writing obituaries as documents and started writing them as modular blocks. A header block with full name, age, date of death, and place of passing. A biographical block with education, career, military service. A survivors block with immediate family. A service details block with date, time, location. A closing block with memorial donations. When the editor needed to cut, they could grab entire blocks without scrambling to preserve meaning. I had families approve each block separately before I sent anything. It added about 15 minutes to the intake process but reduced revision back-and-forth by roughly 70 percent. That saving is real. I tracked it for six months across about 40 submissions.
Cost is another thing people misunderstand. Standard obituaries in the Telegram run anywhere from $100 to $350 depending on length and whether you include a photograph. A photo adds roughly $50 to $75. Cremation-only notices with minimal text can sometimes run under $80, but those are exceptions. The funeral home will usually quote you this before they submit anything. Do not skip that step. I have seen families get surprised by a $400 bill because someone inserted three photos and a full-column layout without confirming the price first. Here is a counter-intuitive detail most people miss. The order in which you list survivors matters more than most families realize. Newspapers follow a strict convention: spouse first, then children, then grandchildren, then parents, then siblings. If you list siblings before parents, the editor will restructure it anyway. Worse, some families include former spouses or step-relations in ways that cause real friction at the reading. I learned to ask families directly how they want the hierarchy arranged and to flag any potentially sensitive inclusions before the draft went to the paper. One time I caught a family wanting to list a former spouse ahead of the current partner. We spent 20 minutes discussing it. The editor would have cut that whole section if they had seen it, which would have caused a bigger problem. Addressing it upfront saved everyone time. Timing is the other thing nobody warns you about. If someone passes on a Thursday and you want the notice in Saturday's paper, you need to get the copy to the newspaper by Wednesday evening at the latest. Late Thursday submissions go in the Monday paper. This is not negotiable. The production schedule is rigid. I once had a family submit on Thursday afternoon hoping for Saturday coverage. They got Monday instead. By Monday, the funeral had already happened and most of their social circle had moved on. It was avoidable.
Get the Full Details
There are edge cases where the standard process breaks down entirely. I dealt with one where the deceased had no known next of kin and no funeral home involved. The paper refused to run the notice without a verifiable submitter. I ended up coordinating with the county public administrator's office to get authorization, which took four business days. If you are in that situation, call the obituary desk on day one and ask specifically about unclaimed estates. Do not assume the normal process applies. Another edge case is multilingual obituaries. The Telegram publishes some bilingual notices, but the secondary language is usually Spanish and only when the family specifically requests it. If you need Chinese, Portuguese, or any other language, call ahead and confirm whether they have the capacity to set it properly. I ran into a situation once where a Portuguese obituary was typeset incorrectly because the paper did not have the proper character support, and the corrected version went out three days late. The family was frustrated but understanding once we explained exactly what had happened. The main limitation of this whole system is that it is built for a paper that is shrinking in circulation. The Telegram's readership skews older, which means the obituary section still matters, but the audience for digital obituaries is different. Younger family members often find out about a death through social media before they see the newspaper notice. This is not a flaw in the process, it is just the reality. If you need maximum reach, supplement the print notice with a Facebook memorial post, an email to the extended family list, and possibly a notice on a dedicated memorial site. The newspaper coverage serves the older demographic that still reads it regularly.
To actually submit, gather the following before you make any calls. Full legal name including any middle names the family wants included. Date and place of birth. Date and place of death. Names and relationships of immediate survivors. Any military service details with branch, rank, and years of service. Educational and professional information, kept brief. Service information if the family wants it included. Memorial donation suggestions. A high-resolution photograph if you want one printed. All of this information goes into a single email or is read aloud during the phone call. Do not send a PDF attachment unless the editor asks for it. Plain text in the body of an email processes faster. I recommend writing your draft on paper first, then transferring it to the submission format. This slows you down enough to catch errors. Spelling a deceased person's name wrong in an obituary is one of the most common mistakes I see, and it is one of the most painful corrections to make after publication. The newspaper can issue a correction, but it appears in a later edition and nobody reads it. If you find yourself dealing with this repeatedly, keep a simple spreadsheet tracking submission dates, publication dates, costs, and any revisions requested. After about ten submissions, you will see patterns. Some editors prefer shorter biographical sections. Others accept longer survivor lists. The patterns let you tailor your approach and reduce the revision cycle on future submissions.
The bottom line is that the process works if you treat it as a collaborative editing task rather than a simple upload. You provide the information. The newspaper shapes it for their layout. Both sides want the notice to appear accurately and respectfully. When communication breaks down, it is usually because expectations were never aligned upfront. Clarify those expectations in the first conversation and the rest of the process runs smoothly.
