Understanding Death Notice Submissions for Local Newspapers
Most people think submitting a death notice is just filling out a form online and waiting for it to appear. That is not how it works. The New London Day operates on a tightly controlled submission window, and if you miss the cutoff, your notice does not get pushed to the next day — it gets held until the editor can fit it in, which might mean a week delay or longer depending on spacing. I have dealt with obituary submissions for small New England newspapers for over a decade. The process is straightforward but unforgiving of errors. Here is what you need to know before you try to submit anything.
The New London Day Obits Honoring Lives Preserving Community History Through Death Notices
Death notices are different from obituaries, even though people use the terms interchangeably. A death notice is a factual announcement — name, age, date of death, funeral home information, maybe a short biographical paragraph. An obituary is usually a longer, written feature, often by a staff writer, that tells the full story of someone's life. The New London Day handles both, but they have completely different submission pathways and pricing structures. Death notices are placed by families or funeral homes directly. Obituaries are usually commissioned through the newspaper's features desk. The cost structure alone will catch most first-time submitters off guard. Death notices are priced per line or per word, and the minimum is typically around $75 to $100. If you include a photograph, that is an additional charge, usually in the $50 to $150 range depending on size. A standard two-photo obituary package from a funeral home can easily run $250 to $400. These numbers vary by market, and I have seen them creep up 15 to 20 percent in the last five years without much public explanation.
How to Actually Submit a Death Notice
You start at the newspaper's official website, usually under a section labeled "Place an Obituary" or "Death Notices." The New London Day routes submissions through a third-party platform — most likely Gannett's own system since they publish the paper. You will create an account, upload the text, select any photos, and choose how many days you want it to run. A single-day run is standard. Some families run it for two or three consecutive days, which costs proportionally more but sometimes makes sense if the family lives across different regions and wants visibility in each area. The text field has strict formatting rules. No HTML, no special characters beyond basic punctuation, and absolutely no line breaks that exceed the platform's character limit per line. I learned this the hard way when trying to submit a death notice for a client whose family included a long list of surviving relatives with titles and full addresses. The platform truncated the entire entry at a hard limit I had not been warned about, and we had to resubmit within the same publication window or lose the day entirely. The workaround was to strip all addresses and middle initials from the survivor list and compress the text into compact form. It took me about ten minutes to reformat, and we made the cutoff by about fifteen minutes.
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Common Pitfalls and What Beginners Miss
The biggest mistake I see is people assuming that whatever text they write will appear exactly as written. It will not. Editors routinely trim excessive language, remove promotional content from funeral homes, and adjust phrasing for consistency with the paper's house style. If you write a three-paragraph biographical sketch when the notice section has room for two paragraphs, expect one paragraph to disappear. This is not personal. It is how the production pipeline works. A second issue involves photo submissions. Most platforms require JPEG files, a minimum resolution of 300 DPI, and a file size under a certain threshold — often 2 MB. Phone cameras now produce images well over that limit, and people routinely try to upload raw phone photos without resizing them. The system may accept the upload, but the print version comes out blurry or pixelated. Always resize your photos before uploading. Even a simple free tool like IrfanView or Preview on a Mac will handle this in seconds. There is also the matter of timing. Submission cutoffs for The New London Day are typically 2:00 PM local time for next-day publication. But "next day" does not mean the paper prints it the next morning — it means the production team has it in the queue for the next available printing cycle. If you submit after the cutoff on a Thursday, your notice does not automatically go in Friday. It may sit until Monday if the paper has a reduced weekend edition or if the notes section is already at capacity.
When the System Fails You
Online submission platforms do not work perfectly. I have watched them crash during high-volume periods, particularly around holidays when death notices spike. If the system goes down on a Tuesday afternoon and you need something published by Wednesday, you are out of luck unless you call the newspaper directly. Having the newspaper's obituary desk phone number saved in your contacts is not advice I give lightly. It has saved me more times than I can count. Another scenario where the standard process breaks down is when the deceased has no immediate family willing or able to handle arrangements. In these cases, the funeral home often steps in, but they may not be familiar with the newspaper's specific requirements either. I have had to help funeral directors reformat notices that were rejected twice because the original text contained symbols or formatting that the platform did not accept. The funeral home thought they had done everything correctly. They had not. Cost overruns are another real problem. People routinely select more display options than they need — boxed notices, color photos, extra days of publication — and then get a bill that is significantly higher than their initial estimate. The platform often shows a running total, but the final invoice can differ if the newspaper adjusts the layout or adds charges for things that were not clearly disclosed upfront. Always request a final proof and the exact cost before confirming publication. Do not assume the estimate on screen is the final price.
What to Include and What to Leave Out
A standard death notice should include the full name of the deceased, age, date and place of death, name of the funeral home handling arrangements, service details if they are known, and a brief survivor list. That is it. Additional personal details, favorite quotes, or lengthy career summaries belong in an obituary, not a death notice, because they consume space that costs money and may get cut by the editor anyway. If you want to preserve a richer record of the person's life, consider submitting both a death notice and a separate letter to the editor or a community history piece. The New London Day occasionally runs historical sketches and community memories that do not carry the same rigid constraints as death notices. This approach costs more in total but gives you far more control over the final content. For genealogical purposes, death notices are useful but incomplete. They rarely include birth dates, parents' names, or military service details unless the family specifically includes them. If you are building a family history record, cross-reference the death notice with census data, Social Security death indexes, and any local cemetery records you can access. The death notice alone will not give you enough to work with, especially for older deaths where record-keeping was less thorough.
One edge case worth noting: if someone dies while traveling out of state or abroad, the local newspaper may still run a death notice if the family requests it and the deceased maintained strong ties to the community. However, some newspapers require verification of residency, which means you may need to provide a current address, utility bill, or voter registration record. This requirement varies by publication and is not always disclosed upfront. Call ahead and ask.
