Submitting Death Notices to the Butler Eagle
The Butler Eagle has been running death notices in Butler, Pennsylvania since the late 1800s, and the process for getting one published is straightforward but has some specifics you should know about if you're handling this for the first time. I've submitted more than a few over the years, usually because people in my family die in this area and the funeral homes here just hand you a piece of paper with instructions and deadlines. You start by calling the newspaper's obituary desk or going to their website. The Butler Eagle currently accepts submissions online through their official portal, and you can also call them directly. Their phone number is listed on the front page of the print edition and on their site. You need basic information: the full name of the deceased, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and where donations can be directed instead of flowers if the family wants that. The standard death notice in the Eagle runs about two to three inches depending on column width, which works out to roughly 150 to 250 words before they start charging you extra for length.
The Butler Eagle Death Notices How A Small Town Paper Shapes Memory And Mourning In Butler Pa
What makes these notices different from a New York Times or Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obituary is the audience. In Butler, the readership is mostly people who actually knew the deceased. The paper itself understands this, which is why the staff there tends to be pretty helpful when you're trying to get things right under time pressure. That said, there are a few things that trip people up consistently. The biggest issue I've run into is the deadline. Print deadlines for the daily paper are around noon the day before publication, and if you miss that window, your notice either goes in the next day's edition or gets pushed to the weekend section, which has a much smaller circulation. I learned this the hard way once when a relative passed away on a Thursday evening and I assumed we had until Friday morning. We didn't. The notice ran Saturday instead, and a bunch of people who would have seen it in the regular paper missed it entirely. Since then, I always aim to get the submission in the night before whenever possible, not the afternoon of. Another edge case is the spelling of names. The Eagle won't publish a notice with a misspelled last name, and they won't call you to ask about it either. If the name on the death certificate doesn't match what you submit, they'll hold the notice until it's corrected. I had this happen with a spouse's maiden name that the funeral home spelled one way and the family records another. It cost us an extra day in the paper while I tracked down the correct spelling from the cemetery records. My workaround was simple: I started bringing a copy of the death certificate to the submission, either to reference or to include with the paperwork, so there was no ambiguity.
The cost structure is also something to plan for. As of the most recent rate card I saw, a standard death notice in the Butler Eagle runs around $75 to $120 depending on length and whether you want it in both the print edition and on their website. Online-only submissions are cheaper, usually half the price. If you're trying to keep costs down during an already expensive time, going digital-only is a real option, though you lose the walk-by readership that matters in a town this size. There's also the question of what actually gets published versus what you might want to include. The Eagle's editorial staff will occasionally trim or edit a notice if it runs significantly over their standard length limit or if the language is ambiguous in a way that could be interpreted as an advertisement for a funeral home rather than a genuine notice. This is rare but it does come up. I've seen one case where a submitter included the full contact information and phone number for a specific funeral director, and the paper converted it to a classified ad charge instead of running it as a death notice. The workaround is to keep the focus on the deceased and the service details, and put any promotional or business-related information in a separate classified ad if you need it there. The physical copy of the Eagle is still a big deal in Butler. I've had people tell me they found out about a funeral only because they were reading the paper on their porch in the morning, and they showed up at the service because they remembered the person from decades ago. That's the thing about a paper like this in a town of about 14,000 people — the notices aren't just announcements. They're the communal record of who lived here and who's gone. The church bulletin boards and the grocery store comment walls don't carry the same weight. When the Eagle prints a death notice, it's the official word that someone mattered to this place.
Get the Full Details
One more practical note: if you're submitting multiple notices in the same family, like a husband and wife who passed within a week of each other, you can sometimes get them published back to back on consecutive days by mentioning the connection in each notice. The staff is reasonable about this, but you have to request it upfront. Don't assume they'll piece it together from separate submissions sent hours apart.
