Writing Better Obituaries When You're Not Sure What to Say
I spent about eight years at a daily paper handling obituaries, and the one thing I learned quickly is that most people have no idea what they're supposed to put in a traditional newspaper death notice. They call the copy desk panicked, it's 11 PM, and they want the piece to sound perfect. It doesn't need to. The Superior Obituaries Project started as exactly that kind of reaction — a group of editors and writers tired of seeing the same five paragraphs recycled for every deceased local. The core idea behind the project was straightforward enough. Instead of using a template that listed birth date, survived by, and predeceased by in the same bland structure every time, they started treating each obituary as a short biographical essay. That meant asking the family what kind of person the deceased actually was rather than just what offices they held or what charities they donated to. The first version of the format ran in early 2023 and got some pushback from readers who felt it was too personal for a newspaper. Two months later, engagement metrics on the obituary section jumped noticeably, and competitors in nearby markets started copying the approach.
The Superior Obituaries Project How A Local Newspaper Is Redefining Memorials In The Digital Age
Here is how the process actually works once a death is reported. The newsroom gets a call or an email from a funeral home or a family member. Rather than filling out a standard submission form, the obit editor sits down for a fifteen-minute phone interview with the person closest to the deceased. That interview replaces the old practice of asking for a list of facts. The editor asks about the person's habits, the things that made them laugh, the job they hated or loved, the small routines that defined their days. Those details become the actual content of the piece. The writing itself follows a loose structure. You open with a factual line — name, age, date of death, and where they lived. Then you move into three or four short paragraphs drawn directly from the interview. The final paragraph handles the practical details: service information, donation requests, and a link to an online memorial page if the paper offers one. That last part is important because most papers now host digital versions of the obituary alongside the print, and the digital version can include photos, video tributes, and a guest book. I have one specific example that still comes up whenever I talk to other editors about this. A family submitted an obituary for a man who had been a tool-and-die maker for forty years. The old format would have listed his employer, his union local, and his survivors. The new approach pulled in a story about how he kept a worn photograph of his first apprentice in his toolbox until he died. That detail became the opening of the piece. It ran on a Saturday. By Monday morning, the funeral home had received twelve messages from people who said they never knew that about him. That is the difference the project was built around.
There are complications that nobody tells you about when you start doing this. The biggest one is grief timing. Families reach out during the worst week of their lives and they are not going to sit down and reflect thoughtfully. You will get fragmented answers, contradictions, and sometimes requests to leave things out that have nothing to do with the deceased and everything to do with family tension. I handled a case once where two siblings wanted completely different versions of the same person's life. One wanted a religious focus. The other wanted it to highlight his secular activism. We ended up running two separate pieces on the same day, one in the main obituary section and one in a community notes column. It was messy, but it was also honest. Another problem that comes up constantly is the photo. Papers used to run a single headshot next to the obituary. The digital version allowed multiple images, but families often sent low-resolution scans from old cameras or heavily filtered phone photos. You need a clear workflow for handling image submissions. The Superior project settled on a simple rule: accept any photo under two megabytes without comment, but run it through a basic sharpening filter and caption it with who took the picture and roughly when. That alone improved the quality of what appeared in the archive without slowing the production schedule. The digital side has changed how long these pieces stay visible. A print obituary runs once and disappears into the archive. A digital obituary stays on the site indefinitely and gets indexed by search engines. That means you need to be more careful about privacy. I have seen families accidentally include a home address or a phone number in the initial draft. Always check for PII before it goes live. A simple workaround is to run the final text through a short checklist — name, age, date of death, survivors, service info, and a single donor link. Anything beyond that needs a second pair of eyes.
Get the Full Details
SEO for obituaries is a thing now, and it is not complicated. People search for the deceased by full name plus the city or employer. If you include those terms naturally in the first two paragraphs, the piece will rank decently within a week. Do not stuff keywords. Do not add a list of the person's hobbies just to hit a word count. Search algorithms are smart enough to flag that, and readers notice it immediately. The project also started a simple feedback system. After an obituary runs, readers can click a link to leave a memory or a message. Those responses get moderated and displayed below the article. This turns a static notice into a living archive. It also creates additional work for the copy desk, which is why some smaller papers struggle to sustain it. If you do not have staff to moderate comments, keep the feature off until you can manage it. Unmoderated comment sections on death notices are not something you want to inherit. There are downsides to this approach that deserve to be stated plainly. It takes more time per piece. The old template method could produce an obituary in about twelve minutes. The interview-based method takes forty-five to ninety minutes depending on how much the family wants to talk. If your newsroom is already short-staffed, this model will stretch you. It also does not work well for people who died suddenly and left no record of themselves in the community. A thirty-year-old who died in an accident may not have a rich set of stories to draw from, and forcing one can feel hollow. In those cases, stick closer to the traditional format and let the facts stand.
For papers considering adopting something similar, start small. Pick one section of the paper and run the new format on three obituaries a week for a month. Track reads, shares, and any feedback from families. If the numbers move, expand it. If they do not, revert and figure out what went wrong before blaming the concept. The Superior Obituaries Project survived because the editors measured results instead of assuming the approach was good because it felt right. It felt right, but the data justified keeping it. If you want to see the actual format in action, the paper's archive is publicly searchable and each digital obituary includes a note about whether it follows the new biographical style. The difference is usually obvious within the first paragraph. You will know it when you read one.
