Understanding How Obituary Submissions Actually Work Now
The Huntington Herald Dispatch obituary process is nothing like it was ten years ago. If you are used to calling the newspaper and reading off a typed letter you wrote at home, you are going to have a rough time. The current system runs entirely through their online portal, and there are specifics about formatting, word counts, photo requirements, and approval windows that they do not advertise prominently on the homepage. Here is what you need to know before you start typing. The Herald Dispatch uses a platform called Legacy Tributes for handling obituary and memorial content. That matters because Legacy has its own quirks. You do not simply paste text into a box and hit submit. The system breaks your submission into sections: biographical sketch, survivor listing, service details, and optional personalization elements. Each section has character or word limits, and if you go over on one, the form locks up and you lose your progress unless you clear the browser cache and start over. I learned that the hard way in early 2023. I was helping a client finalize an obituary for her father, who had served in the Korean War. The military honors section required specific phrasing and branch dates. I spent about forty minutes getting the bio section just right, only to hit a server timeout when I tried to attach the photograph. The entire draft vanished. I had to reconstruct it from scratch in under an hour because the funeral home needed the publication scheduled for a Friday morning run.
The workaround was straightforward once I figured it out. I wrote the complete obituary in a plain text editor first, saved it as a backup, and then entered it section by section into the Legacy portal. I uploaded the photo separately before starting the form. When the timeout happened, I could copy-paste from the saved text file instead of rewriting anything. It took maybe twenty minutes total on the second attempt. This is now my standard procedure for every submission I handle, regardless of how simple the obituary seems. Photo requirements are another area where people run into trouble. The Herald Dispatch accepts JPEG and PNG files. The recommended resolution is 1200 by 800 pixels minimum, but anything larger than 5 megabytes gets compressed aggressively, and the results look muddy in print. If you are submitting a older scanned photograph, do not just scan it at the highest DPI your flatbed will allow. A 600 DPI scan of a faded 4 by 6 print will produce a file that is too large and the compression will destroy the detail anyway. Scan at 300 DPI, crop it to the correct aspect ratio in any basic editing tool, and save it as a JPEG at around 85 percent quality. The resulting file is usually under 2 megabytes and prints cleanly. Pricing is structured by word count and length of publication. A standard obituary that runs for one day typically starts around two hundred dollars for the first hundred words, with each additional word costing somewhere in the range of two to three dollars depending on the current rate schedule. Multi-day runs stack on top of that. There is also a fee for including a photograph, which I believe is around seventy-five dollars on top of the base price. The exact numbers shift periodically, so I would verify on the Herald Dispatch website before you commit to a budget. What I can tell you is that a typical obituary for someone who lived a full life usually runs between three and five hundred dollars for a single-day run, and closer to eight hundred to a thousand if you want it to appear for three consecutive days with a photo included.
Timeline is critical. If you submit through the online portal during business hours, most obituaries get reviewed and approved within four to six hours. Submit after hours and you are looking at next-morning turnaround at the earliest. The funeral home I work with recommends submitting at least forty-eight hours before the desired publication date whenever possible. That gives you a buffer for corrections, resubmissions, or the occasional review flag that takes longer to resolve. I have seen cases where an obituary gets held for review because the system flags certain phrases or military service claims that require manual verification. That can add an extra day or two to the process. One thing the website does not make clear is that you can request corrections after submission but before publication. If you catch a misspelling in a name or an incorrect date, you can call the Herald Dispatch's obituary desk directly and they will usually make the fix without charging you extra, as long as it has not gone to print yet. After it prints, corrections are treated as a separate paid insertion. Keep the confirmation email they send you after submission. It has a reference number that the desk staff can look up quickly when you call with a correction request. There is also a community memorial option that is free and does not go through the Legacy Tributes payment system. This is essentially a user-generated page on the Herald Dispatch website where family and friends can share memories. It is not a substitute for a paid obituary in the newspaper, but it is useful if you want a living memorial page that people can add to over time. I tend to recommend both: a paid obituary for the print edition and a free community memorial page for anyone who wants to contribute stories or photos after the fact.
Get the Full Details
One counter-intuitive detail about the Herald Dispatch specifically: they do merge certain obituaries on weekends. If two people from the same family pass away within a short window, the editorial staff sometimes combines them into a single printed notice rather than running two separate ones. This is not something you can request in advance, and it is not guaranteed. If you want two separate notices, submit them as distinct entries and specify that you want them treated independently. The desk staff will usually honor that request, but it does not hurt to be explicit about it. If the online portal is giving you trouble or you prefer to handle the submission over the phone, you can call the Herald Dispatch directly at (304) 528-2000 during their business hours. The obituary desk is typically staffed Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until five in the evening. Weekends are limited. Phone submissions still work, but you will still need to provide the same information and pay by card over the phone, and you will not get the real-time preview that the online form gives you. The bottom line is that the system works well once you understand the workflow. The biggest problems come from people treating it like it is twenty fourteen and trying to wing it. Write the content first, format the photo correctly, back everything up, and submit with plenty of lead time. That will save you more frustration than any shortcut.
