Working With Local News Obituaries Online: What Nobody Tells You
I spend most of my mornings going through local newspaper archives and the digital obituary sections they maintain. Wgrv News has been doing this for years, and the process of getting an accurate, properly formatted tribute online is surprisingly messy when you actually sit down and try to do it yourself. Most people think submitting an obituary means writing something nice and emailing it. It's a bit more involved than that, especially if you want it to show up correctly on their site and get indexed properly by search engines so the right people can find it.
Wgrv News Obituaries Honoring Lives Preserving Stories In The Digital Age
Before I get into the actual steps, I need to mention one thing that trips up almost everyone: the difference between a legacy print obituary and what actually works as a digital piece. Print obits are constrained by column width, space costs, and deadline cycles. Digital obits have none of those problems, but they come with their own set of issues that funeral directors and families rarely anticipate. I handled an obituary submission for a family last year where the deceased had been active in three separate community organizations over forty years. The family wanted all of it included. The printed version would have cut it to four paragraphs. The digital version could hold everything, but it also meant the page loaded slowly on mobile because they uploaded six high-resolution photos without compressing them first. That's a detail that matters more than you'd think.
How To Prepare And Submit An Obituary To Wgrv News
Here is the straightforward process, based on what I've seen work and what has failed outright. Step one: Gather the core biographical facts before you write anything. Full legal name, any nicknames or maiden names, date of birth, date of death, city of residence at the time of passing, and the name of the funeral home handling arrangements. Wgrv typically requires at least one of these elements to verify the submission before they publish. I've had pieces returned because the date of birth didn't match public records and they couldn't confirm legitimacy. Step two: Draft the life story portion. This is where most people struggle. A good digital obituary runs between 300 and 800 words. Anything under 200 words reads like a template and gets skipped by readers. Anything over a thousand words and the engagement metrics drop because people are scrolling past. Aim for the middle ground.
Get the Full Details
Include the key milestones, but also include one or two specific details that make the person identifiable beyond their resume. I remember reading an obituary that listed a man's military service, his career as an accountant, and his survivors. Then in the third paragraph it mentioned he was known for growing prize-winning tomatoes and teaching his neighbors how to do it. That single sentence made the whole piece feel real. Families often leave that stuff out because they think it's too informal. Step three: Select and prepare your photos. Wgrv accepts JPEG and PNG files. They prefer a primary portrait photo at a minimum resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels, but they will accept smaller files and upscale them, which degrades quality. Do not upload photos directly from a smartphone camera without resizing or compressing them. A typical phone photo is around 4000 by 3000 pixels. That forces their CMS to process a massive file, which slows down the page load for every visitor reading the obituary on a cell phone. I once compressed a batch of ten photos using a free tool called Squoosh to 1200 pixels wide at 75 percent quality. The file size dropped from roughly 8 megabytes total to about 900 kilobytes with zero visible degradation. That's the kind of technical detail that separates an obituary that performs well from one that doesn't.
Step four: Submit through the correct channel. Wgrv News accepts obituary submissions through their website's designated obituary portal, not through the general news tip line. Make sure you're on their official obit section and not some third-party aggregator. There are several sites that scrape local obituaries and redirect traffic, and submitting through those means your piece may not reach the editors at all. I've lost count of the number of families who sent submissions to a redirect site and then wondered why nothing appeared. Step five: Verify the publication. After you submit, you should receive a confirmation email within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If you don't get that, check your spam folder, then call the obituary desk directly. I've seen submissions sit in queues for up to a week during holiday periods when staff is thin. Being patient helps, but being proactive about following up also helps.
Common Mistakes That Get Obituaries Rejected Or Buried
The number one reason I see digital obituaries underperform or get revised is incorrect naming. If the deceased went by a name that differs from their legal name or what appears on their driver's license, search engines will never connect the obituary to the person's actual identity. I handled a case where a woman was known her entire life as "Barbara" but her legal name was "Barbra." The obituary used Barbra everywhere. Her nieces and nephews who knew her as Barbara never found the page through a search. Changing that one detail in the headline and first paragraph fixed the discoverability problem entirely. Another frequent error is linking to external memorial sites that require logins or have pop-up ads. Wgrv's editorial guidelines explicitly discourage embedding links to commercial memorial platforms because they degrade the reader experience and create privacy concerns. Keep links to donation pages, funeral home information, or verified social media memorials instead.
Preserving The Story Beyond The Initial Publication
Once an obituary publishes on Wgrv News, it stays indexed on Google and other search engines. That's valuable, but it's also fragile. Websites change, domains get sold, and articles get taken down for various reasons. I've watched at least a dozen local obituaries disappear when their hosting provider shut down without warning. The workaround I always recommend is creating a personal archive. Take a PDF copy of the published obituary, save the URL, and store it in a cloud folder along with any photos and the original manuscript. I also suggest asking the funeral home to preserve a copy. Most of them maintain digital archives and will provide one on request, usually at no extra cost. There is also the question of memorial content that goes beyond the obituary itself. Families often compile additional stories, letters, and memories after the initial publication. Wgrv does not currently offer a dedicated memorial page feature where users can add to an obituary over time. The workaround is to publish a follow-up piece a few weeks later when more memories have surfaced, or to create a private digital archive that friends and family can access through a shared link.
What This Process Does Not Do Well
I want to be straightforward about the limitations here. Digital obituaries on local news sites are not designed to be comprehensive life records. They are editorial pieces with word limits and editorial oversight. If your goal is to create a detailed, permanent digital memorial with timelines, full photo galleries, and community contributions, a local news obituary is the wrong tool for that job. Dedicated memorial platforms like Forevermemories or Evenlane offer more robust features for that purpose, though they come with their own tradeoffs around data ownership and long-term availability. The other limitation is timing. Wgrv News typically processes obituaries on business days, Monday through Friday. Submissions made on weekends or holidays are queued until the next business day. If you need immediate publication due to an upcoming service, call ahead and ask whether expedited processing is available. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, and the answer depends entirely on current staffing levels. Finally, there is the question of cost. Local news obituaries are not free. Wgrv charges based on word count and whether photos are included. Expect to pay somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred fifty dollars depending on the length and number of images. Funeral homes often bundle this cost into their services, which is convenient but sometimes means families don't realize they can submit directly and save money by cutting out the middleman markup.
The bottom line is that getting an obituary published on Wgrv News is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's frustrating if you don't. The technical details about image sizing, naming consistency, and submission channels matter more than most people expect. Pay attention to those details and the piece will serve its purpose. Ignore them and you'll be fixing things after the fact.
