What Midtown Chapel Obits Have Been Showing Over the Last Few Years
I started tracking obituary language patterns at Midtown Chapel roughly seven years ago, mostly because I kept noticing the same shifts repeating across different families and demographics. The data isn't anything fancy - it's just a manual log of what showed up in printed and online obituaries over time. But the trends are clear enough that anyone working in the industry has probably felt them even if they haven't been writing them down. The biggest single change I've seen is the move from purely newspaper-based obituaries to digital-first or digital-only formats. Around 2018, about 60 percent of Midtown Chapel families still wanted a print run in the local paper. By 2023 that number had dropped to roughly 22 percent. The rest split between chapel websites, social media posts, and funeral home pages. It's not just a preference thing either. Print obituaries in the Metro edition ran about $185 for a standard five-line piece back in 2018. By 2024 that same space was closer to $290. Families notice that quickly. Length has gone the other direction. Older obituaries I'd file averaged around 200 to 300 words. Current ones tend to land between 400 and 700. People want more detail now - surviving family members listed with full names and relationships, career highlights, military service summarized rather than just flagged, charity donation requests spelled out with addresses or links. It takes longer to write and it takes longer for families to approve, which creates a bottleneck during the actual arrangement conference.
Language tone has softened too. The word "passed" dominates now where "died" or "departed" used to show up more often. Survivors lists routinely include pets. Religious language is down about 40 percent compared to the early 2010s, though that varies heavily by area and the chapel's customer base. At Midtown we saw the shift happen slower than in some surrounding markets because our core demographic skews older and more traditional, but it still happened. One thing that doesn't get discussed enough is the impact of COVID on obituary volume and style. Midtown Chapel processed roughly 14 percent more obituaries in 2020 than in 2019. That wasn't unique to us - it was the pattern nationally. But the style shift accompanying that spike matters more. Families were writing from grief and distance, many without being in the same room as extended relatives. That produced obituaries with more errors in names and dates than usual, and a lot more last-minute corrections after publication. I learned to build in a second proofing pass for any obituary where the submitter hadn't met with us in person. It catches things the first review misses, usually a misspelled middle name or a wrong maiden name on a surviving spouse. Personalization has increased across the board. QR codes on print pieces linking to memorial videos or photo galleries showed up in maybe 3 percent of our obituaries in 2020. By 2024 that number was hovering around 18 percent. Some of those QR codes point to Spotify playlists, some to GoFundMe pages for medical debts, some to private Facebook groups for family only. It's useful for families but it creates a new problem - we can't verify whether those links stay active, and I've had several cases where a link worked at time of publication and died within a month, which looks bad for everyone involved.
The demographics of who writes the obituary have shifted too. Fifty-five percent of our current obituaries are drafted by the deceased's children or grandchildren rather than by a surviving spouse. That changes the voice in the text noticeably. Spouses tend to write in a more formal, traditional register. Children and grandchildren lean toward narrative style, sometimes including anecdotes that would have been cut in earlier decades. One obituary I filed included a paragraph about the deceased's hobby of restoring vintage lawnmowers. It was two hundred words long and the family refused to shorten it. It stayed in.
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What Actually Works When You're Writing One of These Now
If you're preparing an obituary for Midtown Chapel or any similar provider, the process is straightforward but the expectations have changed. Start by getting the basic facts right before you worry about tone. Full legal name, date of birth, date of death, city of residence at death, and a complete survivors list. That list should include spouse, children, grandchildren, and parents if they're still living. Siblings are optional but increasingly common. I always recommend including partner names even when legal marriage isn't on record - families have told me repeatedly that leaving someone out causes friction that outlasts the funeral itself. Biographical content should run about 150 to 250 words for standard length. Military service gets its own sentence or two if applicable. Occupation and employer history can be compressed into one line unless the person held a notable position. Charity information should include the full legal name of the organization and a mailing address. Many modern obituaries also include a website link, but remember that web links in print pieces are dead space unless you add a QR code. The approval process is where most delays happen. Get the draft to the primary contact within twenty-four hours of the arrangement conference. Follow up by phone the next morning if you haven't received markup. Email markup works but is slower and produces more errors because people edit in bursts rather than in one clean pass. I've found that having families read the draft aloud during a brief call catches more mistakes than any editing method I've tried.
Photo selection matters more than people realize. Chapel websites and social media listings pull the first image automatically. A low-resolution scan or a blurry cell phone photo will degrade the entire presentation. Ask for at least a 1200-pixel-wide JPEG at time of arrangement. Don't wait until the obituary is ready to ask - that's usually too late and people scramble, resulting in worse images.
Where the Current Model Falls Apart
There are real limits to what the current system handles well. The biggest one is the mismatch between traditional newspaper deadlines and the speed at which families want digital obituaries published. Print deadlines are usually 3 PM local time, and missing that window pushes publication to the next day. Digital listings on chapel sites can go up within hours, but most families still want the print version for older relatives who don't check websites. That means doing the work twice - once for digital speed and again for print compliance, which often requires slight reformatting since character counts differ between platforms. Another issue is the growing reliance on third-party obituary platforms. Many families submit through Legacy.com or similar services rather than through the funeral home directly. Those platforms have their own formatting rules, character limits, and approval timelines that don't always align with what the chapel needs. I've lost track of how many times a family submitted through a third party, the funeral home never saw the draft, and we ended up publishing a second version with conflicting information. It creates confusion for readers and adds work for staff who have to untangle it. The cost pressure on print obituaries is real but uneven. Some markets have seen steeper increases than others. In our area, the five-line standard rate went from roughly $185 to $290 over six years, which is about 57 percent increase. That's above general inflation for the period. Some smaller papers have dropped obituary sections entirely, which removes an option families used to consider standard. When a paper goes fully digital, the pricing model shifts to subscription or page-view ads, and the obituary becomes a revenue driver in a different way - sometimes more expensive per word than print was.
Privacy is another boundary that keeps moving. Social media makes it easier to share details that previously stayed inside the family circle. I've seen obituaries that included the deceased's exact home address, which creates safety concerns for surviving family members. Some states have considered legislation around this but nothing has passed at the level that would affect chapels directly. The workaround I use is simple - I flag any address-level detail to the family and ask them to confirm in writing that they want it included. It adds maybe ten minutes to the process and prevents problems later.
Numbers That Actually Matter for Planning
If you're working with Midtown Chapel or similar providers on obituary preparation, here are the practical figures that shape the experience. Average time from death to obituary publication is currently 2.3 days for digital and 3.8 days for print-inclusive orders. The longest delay usually comes from family approval cycles, not from the funeral home. Most of those delays are two to four hours. Occasional ones stretch to thirty-six hours when extended family disagrees on content, which is rare but disruptive. Word count inflation is roughly 85 percent higher now than it was ten years ago for standard obituaries. Space cost per word in print has increased about 9 percent annually in our market, compounding quickly. Digital listings don't have the same per-word cost pressure, which is why the shift matters. Length creeps up there too but not as dramatically because there's no extra charge for an additional paragraph. QR code adoption has grown from under 3 percent to about 18 percent over four years. Photo resolution standards have tightened correspondingly - what looked acceptable on a 2019 chapel website looks soft on a 2024 screen. Staff training on image requirements now starts at the arrangement conference instead of waiting until obituary compilation, which reduces back-and-forth significantly.
The religious language decline I mentioned earlier tracks roughly at 4 to 5 percent per year in our customer base. That's an estimate based on internal coding, not a census. Markets with different demographics will show different rates. Secular language doesn't replace religious language one-for-one though - often it just leaves that section of the obituary blank or replaces it with a generic "remembered fondly" type phrase. The structural role the religious segment filled stays, even when the content changes. Errors in final published obituaries run about 1 error per 47 words on first publication based on my spot checks over the last two years. Most are minor - a missing middle initial, a swapped date. Rarely does an error cause real harm, but the correction process is annoying for families who have to deal with it. The second proofing pass I described above cuts that error rate roughly in half, which is worth the extra fifteen minutes it takes. Military honors mentions appear in about 11 percent of our obituaries now, up from roughly 7 percent a decade ago. That tracks with veteran population growth and increased awareness of benefits. Service details tend to be accurate when families provide the DD-214 or equivalent documentation. When they don't, we see inflated claims - "served in Vietnam" when the person was in the Navy during peacetime, for example. The fix is straightforward but requires asking upfront rather than assuming.
A Practical Note on Managing the Workload
Midtown Chapel's obituary team handles roughly 12 to 18 obituaries per week at any given time, depending on season. Volume peaks around January and February, dips slightly in summer, and rises again in November and December. The staffing ratio hasn't kept pace with the increase in word count and personalization requests, which means each obituary now takes about 40 percent more time to produce than it did five years ago. That translates to longer wait times for families during busy periods and more pressure on the staff who write and compile them. The most effective approach I've found is to separate fact-gathering from narrative drafting. Get all the names, dates, and relationships locked down in a structured form first. Then write the obituary around that skeleton. Trying to do both at once slows things down and increases errors. The structured form approach cuts average production time from about 45 minutes per obituary down to roughly 28 minutes, according to my own timing logs. Families who come in with a typed list of survivors and key biographical points finish the process in about an hour from arrangement conference to approved draft. Families who don't have that information take closer to two hours because the staff has to collect and verify everything during the meeting itself. There's no reason not to prepare that list in advance, and I always suggest it.
The industry will keep shifting. Print obituaries will continue to lose ground to digital. Word counts will keep rising unless cost pressure reverses the trend. Personalization will increase as families treat obituaries as memorial projects rather than announcements. The people who adapt fastest are the ones who prepare documentation early and understand that the process now involves more steps than it used to, not fewer.
