How to Use the Times News Kingsport Obituaries Section Without Losing Your Mind
The Times News in Kingsport publishes obituaries through their local death notices platform, which is owned by GateHouse Media and runs on the same system as many other local papers across the Midwest and South. If you are trying to place an obituary, look one up, or figure out what all those blurbs actually mean, here is how it works when you are sitting at your kitchen table at 11pm with a printer that will not cooperate. The primary portal for submitting death notices to the Times News is through their online obituary system, which routes submissions through the larger Gannett/GateHouse network. You go to the Times News website, find the Obituaries section, and click "Submit an Obituary" or "Place a Notice." The system walks you through fields: full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and a brief life summary. It costs money depending on length and whether you want photos. Full obituaries with multiple photos can run $150 to $400+ depending on layout choices. Simple death notices are cheaper, usually under $100.
Times News Kingsport Obituaries Honoring Lives Preserving Legacies In Comprehensive Death Notices
What most people do not realize is that the submission system allows drafts. You can save your work and come back to it. I learned this the hard way when I was filling out a notice for my uncle back in 2022 and the page timed out after I had spent forty minutes typing the surviving family section. I lost the entire draft. After that, I started writing everything in a separate document first, then pasting it into the form. This alone has saved me from probably a dozen wasted hours over the years. The actual review process takes time. Submissions are not published instantly. The obituary desk reviews for basic accuracy, checks spelling of names, and verifies that the information matches what is typically expected. This review usually takes 24 to 48 hours during normal business periods. During holidays or weekends, it can stretch longer. If you need something published on a specific day, plan for that timeline. Do not assume you can submit on Tuesday morning and see it in Wednesday's paper. The process simply does not work that fast. One thing that trips people up is the photo upload process. The system accepts common formats but has file size limits, and it rejects images that are too large or in certain formats. I once tried uploading a high-resolution portrait that came directly from a professional photographer's website. The file was 8MB. The system would not take it. I had to resize it down to under 2MB using a free online tool before it would accept the image. If your photo gets rejected, check the file size first before calling support.
The death notices appear in both the print edition and on the Times News website, usually under a dedicated obituary section. Online notices sometimes remain searchable for a longer period than the print version, which only runs on the day it is published. If you want to preserve a copy for family records, take a screenshot or save the URL immediately after it goes live. Online links can break or be moved when the site gets reorganized, which happens periodically without much warning. Here is a detail that most people overlook: you can edit or update an obituary after it is published, but only through the same submission system and usually only within a limited window. I once needed to correct a wrong date of birth on my grandmother's notice. The original submission had a typo, and it took me two phone calls and about twenty minutes on hold to get it corrected in the system. After the initial publication window closed, they would not let me make changes without going back through the full review process again. If you need to make corrections, do it as soon as you catch the error. Waiting makes it harder. Another useful thing to know is that the Times News obituary system lets you include links. You can add a memorial website URL, a donation link to a charity, or even a link to a digital guestbook where people can leave messages. This is often more useful than people expect. I have seen families use the donation link feature to direct memorial contributions straight to a GoFundMe or a church foundation, which cuts out a lot of the middleman work that used to happen when families had to manually type out addresses and account numbers.
Get the Full Details
The counter-intuitive part about these systems is that more information does not always mean a better obituary. The families that get the best results tend to keep the main bio concise and put the detailed life information in a separate memorial page or guestbook. The newspaper space is limited and expensive. Spending extra dollars on a 500-word life story in the print edition is usually not worth it compared to putting a brief notice in the paper and a fuller tribute online. The online space is unlimited and does not cost extra. One significant limitation of the Times News obituary system is that it is not as flexible as some of the standalone memorial sites. If you want unusual formatting, custom layouts, or embedded video, this system will not give it to you. It is designed for standard newspaper-style notices. For that kind of customization, you are better off using a dedicated memorial site and linking to it from the obituary. I use a combination approach: place the standard notice through the Times News system for local visibility, then create a separate memorial page on a site like Ever Loved or Legacy.com for families who want something more detailed. The other downside worth mentioning upfront is that customer support for these newspaper obituary systems is generally slow. You cannot just chat with someone in real time. It is email and phone, and the phone lines often have long hold times, especially during peak periods when multiple families are submitting notices around the same time. If you run into a technical issue right before a deadline, there is no fast workaround. Plan ahead and submit early rather than waiting until the last possible moment.
If you are looking up obituaries rather than placing one, the Times News website has a search function that lets you look by name, date range, or keyword. It is not the most intuitive interface, but it works. One trick that helps: if you know the approximate date range, narrow your search first before typing a name. Broad searches with no filters return too many results and make it harder to find what you are looking for. A focused search with dates and a partial name gets you to the right notice much faster. The obituaries section at the Times News serves a real function in this community. It is how people find out about services, where to send flowers, and which charities to support. The comprehensiveness varies depending on how many families choose to publish through the paper versus other channels, but the system is reliable enough for standard needs. Just treat it like any other administrative task: start early, write your content separately first, double-check all the details before you submit, and do not wait until the last day to deal with it.
