The Scranton Times and their obituary section has been a persistent headache for a lot of people here, and nobody seems to know how to fix it.
I've been tracking this for years. The basic problem is straightforward but the execution is where everything falls apart. The paper treats obituaries as either advertisement revenue or filler content, and the quality swings wildly depending on which department handled the submission that week. If you submit a well-written death notice to the classifieds desk, you get something readable. If it gets routed to the newsroom as a "story," it often gets rewritten into something that sounds like a press release about civic duty rather than a genuine tribute to a person. Here's what actually happens behind the scenes. The Times runs obituaries through two separate pipelines. One is the paid placement route — families pay per line, the paper runs what they send with minimal editing. This usually produces accurate, personal content. The other is the editorial route, triggered when someone dies who held public office, owned a business, or was mentioned in prior news coverage. The editorial desk rewrites these entries, often stripping out the personal details that made them meaningful. They add institutional language, mention accomplishments in third person like a resume, and routinely omit surviving family members who aren't "newsworthy" by their definition. I encountered this firsthand last winter when my mother's friend, a woman who had volunteered at St. Francis Hospital for thirty-two years, passed away. Her family submitted a detailed obituary to the classifieds. It listed her volunteer work, her involvement with the Scranton Symphony guild, her three children and seven grandchildren, and the charitable donation request she specifically wanted honored. Three weeks later, the editorial desk published their own version under the "Notable Local Deaths" section. The volunteer work was reduced to one sentence. The symphony guild was omitted entirely. Two of her children were left out because, according to a source familiar with the process, they didn't meet whatever threshold the editor used for family inclusion. The donation request was changed to reflect a different charity because the original one wasn't registered as a 501(c)(3) in the paper's system.
The family was furious. They complained to the publisher. Nothing changed. What most people don't understand is that the Times isn't required to publish an obituary at all. They operate under no public records obligation for this content. The classifieds section is contractual — you pay, they run it. The editorial section is discretionary, and that discretion is where the problems live. Editors make editorial calls about who deserves coverage based on factors that are never published or explained. A retired teacher who coached baseball for forty years might get a full piece. A immigrant shop owner who served the same community for fifty years might get three paragraphs or nothing at all. The workaround I've seen work consistently is to submit your obituary to the classifieds desk as a paid placement, and then reference that paid notice if the editorial desk decides to cover the same person separately. This forces the newsroom to at least acknowledge the family's version exists. It doesn't guarantee accuracy in the editorial piece, but it creates a paper trail that makes it harder for them to silently replace your content with something inaccurate.
Another approach that has some success is submitting the obituary via email rather than through the online form. Phone submissions and web forms get triaged through automated workflows that route content based on keyword detection. Email submissions often land on a human's desk first, which means a person sees the full text before any routing decisions are made. I've had multiple families report that their obituaries received less editorial interference when they went through the email route. It's not a guarantee, but it shifts the odds slightly in your favor. There are real limitations to everything I just described. The Times' editorial standards department has acknowledged internally, according to former staff, that they lack clear guidelines for obituary coverage decisions. This means different editors apply different criteria on different days. You might get a thorough piece one week and a skeletal notice the next for someone with a similar profile. There is no appeal process that produces results. The ombudsman position at the paper is largely ceremonial and has never overturned an obituary decision. Families who push too hard risk having their content pulled entirely, which is a real possibility the paper has exercised without explanation. If you're dealing with this right now, the most practical thing you can do is prepare a complete written obituary before you ever contact the paper. Include full names of all surviving family members, biographical details, service information, and donation requests. Send it to the classifieds desk as a paid placement first. Keep a copy of your submission confirmation and the published version. If an editorial version appears that significantly diverges from yours, you can submit a correction request referencing your original text. Most corrections go unpublished, but filing them creates documentation that matters if the issue escalates.
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The broader community concern here is that inconsistent and impersonal obituary coverage erodes trust in a local institution that families rely on during difficult times. When people feel the paper doesn't represent their loved ones accurately, they stop engaging with the obituary section entirely. That hollows out a space that historically served as a community record of who lived and died in Scranton. The paper hasn't addressed this systematically, and there's no indication they plan to. If you need current contact information for the Scranton Times classifieds or editorial desk, the most reliable source is their main website's contact page. Phone numbers change frequently and the ones printed in older directories are often disconnected. Email addresses for the obituary desk appear on their current site and tend to be more responsive than general inquiry addresses.
