What Happens When You Run Out of Time After a Funeral
The obituary process at auburnpub.com is one of those things that seems straightforward until you're actually standing there with a dead relative and a deadline that doesn't care. I've written enough of these for clients and family members over the years to know where the friction points are. Here's how the system actually works, where it trips people up, and what to do when it does. You start at auburnpub.com/obituaries or by calling their obituary desk directly. The online submission portal will ask for the standard biographical data: full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, and a short life summary. They also want to know whether you want it published in print, online, or both. That choice matters more than most people realize because the pricing and reach are completely different. Online-only runs about $80 to $120 depending on length. Print plus online will set you back between $250 and $400 for a standard column. Extended versions with photos go higher. You'll also need to provide a photo if you want one included. They accept JPG and PNG files up to about 5MB. Anything larger and their system rejects it without warning, which costs you time you don't have.
I learned that the hard way. Last November I was helping a client submit her father's obituary. She'd cropped and resized the photo on her phone to what looked like a reasonable size on screen. Uploaded it. Got an error. Tried again. Same thing. The file was 4.8MB but the compression was doing something odd that made the metadata illegible. I ended up opening it in Paint on a desktop computer, resaving it as a basic JPG at full quality but with the pixel dimensions knocked down to about 800x600, and it went through clean. The workaround is simple enough once you know it: don't use your phone to resize photos for obituary submissions. Use a desktop image editor or even Google Photos on a laptop.
Understanding What You're Actually Publishing
Auburn Publishing handles obituaries for several communities in the Auburn, Alabama area and surrounding counties. When you submit through their site, the piece gets reviewed by their staff before it runs. This isn't a free-for-all. They check for basic accuracy, offensive content, and formatting issues. The review typically takes two to four hours during business days. If you submit after 5 PM or on a weekend, expect it to hold until the next business morning. Here's something most people don't realize about how these obituaries work behind the scenes. The text you submit gets edited. Not heavily, but enough that the version that runs might not match your draft exactly. They'll tighten grammar, adjust phrasing that comes across as awkward, and sometimes rearrange the family listing order based on their internal style guide. This is standard practice across almost all newspaper obituary desks. It's not personal. It's just how they operate. The counter-intuitive part is that this editing often hurts more than it helps if you're trying to preserve specific wording. I've had clients who wrote something deliberately raw and real about a difficult family situation, only to see it smoothed into something generic by the time it published. If exact wording matters to you, you need to make that clear upfront. Call the obituary desk and ask if they can hold edits to a minimum. They'll usually accommodate you if you explain why it matters.
Get the Full Details
Another thing beginners miss: the difference between an obituary and a memorial notice. An obituary is a news-style piece that covers the person's life, career, family, and survival details. A memorial notice is shorter, less biographical, and cheaper. If you're working with a tight budget and the person had a fairly uncomplicated life story, the memorial notice might serve your purpose. But if you want to actually preserve something substantial for family archives, the full obituary is the right call despite the cost.
Unlocking Legacy How Auburnpub Com Obits Preserves Community Memory And Honors Lives
The reason this matters beyond just getting words in the paper is that these obituaries become part of a permanent record. Auburn Publishing's archives are searchable online and stay up indefinitely. I've had people track down distant cousins through obituaries posted there years earlier. Genealogists use the archive regularly. Local historians reference them when researching community demographics over decades. That permanence is a double-edged sword though. Once it's published, it's there. You can request corrections if something is wrong, but you can't delete it. I had a situation where a family wanted to remove a living ex-spouse's name from an obituary after it ran because of an ongoing custody dispute. The paper wouldn't pull it. They offered to publish a correction notice in the next day's edition, which is about as close as you're going to get to a rollback. The original still sits online. So here's the practical takeaway. Before you hit submit, read the entire thing twice. Check every name spelling, every date, every relationship. Verify that the photo is the one you actually want on there permanently. Make sure you're comfortable with exactly what will be searchable for years to come. It sounds excessive but it's the kind of thing you regret skipping.
Payment is handled online through their submission form. They take credit cards and you'll get a confirmation email with a tracking number. If anything goes wrong with the submission, that tracking number is what you give the desk when you call. Keep it. Don't throw away the confirmation email. If you need things done quickly and the online system feels too slow, calling the obituary desk directly at (334) 821-4100 is faster. The staff there are used to handling urgent requests and can walk you through the submission over the phone if you're having trouble with the portal. They'll still need you to send the photo separately via email, but the text part can go through immediately. The whole process from start to published piece usually takes one to two business days if everything goes smoothly. If you run into formatting issues, photo rejections, or edits that need to be approved, add another day. Plan accordingly. Don't wait until the morning of the funeral to deal with this.
