Finding The Right Format For Sun News Obituaries In Myrtle Beach
Most people don't realize there is an actual procedure for getting an obituary placed in the Myrtle Beach Sun News, and getting it wrong means delays, extra fees, or the piece being rejected outright on short notice. I have spent more time than I care to admit navigating this process for family members and clients over the years, so here is what actually works without wasting everyone's time. The Sun News publishes obituaries daily, and the primary submission route is through their online portal at sunnews.com. You can also submit by phone or email, but the online form is where most of the actual processing happens. The deadline for same-day placement is typically 3:00 PM local time, and if you miss that window your piece rolls to the next print cycle, which in practice means a 24 to 48 hour delay depending on the day of the week. Weekend deadlines are tighter because the production schedule shifts. I ran into a specific issue last November when a family submitted an obituary with an out-of-state death certificate date that did not match the local funeral home records. The Sun News verification team flagged it and held the piece for review, which pushed publication from Tuesday to Thursday. The workaround was straightforward: I had the funeral director email a signed confirmation directly to the Sun News obit editor with the corrected timeline, and that cleared the hold within a few hours. Always make sure the dates on your death certificate, the funeral home paperwork, and your draft obituary align before you submit anything.
The cost structure is another area where people get surprised. As of my last check, a standard text-only obituary runs approximately $85 to $120 depending on length, with additional charges for photographs, which typically add $25 to $50 per image. If you want the piece to run in both the print edition and on the Sun News website, the pricing is bundled rather than doubled, which most people assume separately. There is no free tier, and they do not publish memorials or shoutouts without a paid obituary attached. Writing the actual content is where most families struggle, not because they lack words but because they include too much unnecessary information. The Sun News prefers obituaries that run between 150 and 300 words. Anything beyond that gets edited down anyway, and the editor's cuts are rarely kind to the original sentiment. Stick to the essentials: full name, age, city of residence, date and location of death, surviving family members, predeceased relatives, biographical highlights, and service details. Avoid lists of extended relatives unless they are directly relevant to the narrative. A typical well-structured obituary for a 78-year-old retired teacher in Myrtle Beach looks like four or five tight paragraphs, nothing more. Photographs matter significantly more than people expect. The Sun News requires a high-resolution image, ideally at least 300 DPI, and they reject blurry phone snapshots or heavily cropped images without warning. I learned this the hard way when a family sent a decent portrait that looked fine on a phone screen but was only 72 DPI and pixelated at print size. The fix was pulling the original photo from the funeral home's cloud folder, which had the full-resolution file, and resubmitting within an hour of the editor's rejection notice. Keep the original file handy before you start the submission process.
There is also a lesser-known detail about veteran deaths. The Sun News will include military honors and service information in the obituary at no additional charge if you provide the branch, rank, years of service, and any decorations. They do not run this automatically, so you have to request it explicitly in your submission notes. I have seen multiple families forget this step, and the editor will not add it without being asked. It takes about ten seconds to include and means something to the right readers. If you need the obituary published quickly and the standard portal timeline does not work for you, the Sun News offers an expedited placement option for an additional fee, usually around $50 on top of the base cost. This moves your piece into the next available print run regardless of the 3:00 PM cutoff, which has saved families more than once when death occurred late in the day. Whether it is worth the extra cost depends entirely on your timeline, but it is useful to know it exists before you are scrambling at midnight. The biggest mistake I see repeatedly is assuming the obituary writing process is separate from the funeral arrangements. It is not, and coordinating between the funeral director, the family, and the newspaper produces the cleanest result. Your funeral director can often submit the obituary on your behalf through a pre-arranged channel with the Sun News, which eliminates most formatting and deadline errors. If you are handling this yourself, keep the editor's contact information handy and do not wait until the last possible hour to submit anything.
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