Understanding the Wheeling Intelligencer Obituaries Section
The Wheeling Intelligencer runs one of the more established obituary sections in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. It covers Ohio County and surrounding areas, which means most submissions trace back to families with multi-generational roots in the region. The obituaries aren't just names and dates. They tend to include church affiliations, veteran service records, club memberships, and sometimes detailed career histories. I have dealt with enough of these over the years to notice the pattern. Here is how the process actually works when you are submitting an obituary. You go through the Intelligencer's website or call their advertising department. The standard rate has been around $200 to $350 depending on length and placement. A basic obituary runs about 150 words minimum before they start charging by the line. If you want a photo included, that is usually an extra $50 on top. The turnaround time is typically 24 to 48 hours, but if you submit after 3 p.m., you are looking at the next day's edition at the earliest. I ran into a specific problem last year that I do not think most families encounter unless they dig into the details. A client needed to submit an obituary for her father who had served in two separate branches of the military during his lifetime. The form on the website had a single dropdown for military service, and the options only listed "Army," "Navy," "Air Force," and "Marines." Her father was Coast Guard and National Guard. Neither appeared. The forms team had apparently not updated the field in over a decade. What I ended up doing was writing out both service branches manually in the narrative section of the submission and noting it in the comments field. The editor who handled it caught it and put both branches in the final printed version. That is not guaranteed every time. You have to flag it explicitly.
The deeper issue most people miss is timing relative to the death certificate. The obituary has to match the legal information on the death certificate exactly, and I have seen multiple cases where the submitted obituary listed a middle name or a slightly different birth date because the family was working from memory or old records. The Intelligencer's staff will catch the discrepancy and call you. That slows everything down. If the death certificate shows "Robert James Smith" and your draft says "Bob Smith," they will ask you to reconcile it. The workaround is simple: get a copy of the death certificate before you start writing anything. It saves roughly two days of back-and-forth communication with the editor's office. Another thing nobody tells you is that the obituary section gets crowded on certain days. Weekend editions, especially Saturday, tend to have significantly more obituaries than weekday issues. If you are trying to get maximum visibility for a well-known local figure, submitting on a Thursday or Friday often means the piece lands in a lighter section with fewer competing stories. I track this informally across several years of submissions. The difference in word count coverage between a Saturday and a Tuesday edition is noticeable. Editors sometimes trim longer pieces when space is tight on busy days. The Intelligencer also publishes a dedicated online obituary section that mirrors the print version. The online version stays up indefinitely, which matters if you want the link to be shareable with family members who live outside the area. Print obituaries are gone after the edition passes. Online ones remain searchable through Google and the paper's site. Some families pay for the print placement and then ask if the online version is included. It is. There is no separate fee for the digital version as long as the print obituary runs.
There are genuine limitations to be aware of. The Intelligencer does not accept obituaries from funeral homes unless those homes have a contracted advertising relationship with the paper. Independent submissions from families are processed differently and sometimes take longer because they go through a different queue. If you are working with a funeral home that is not a regular advertiser, expect an additional day or two on processing. Also, the paper has a strict policy on content. They will not publish obituaries that contain political statements, religious proselytizing, or language that could be considered defamatory. This comes up more often than you would think. I have watched editors cut entire paragraphs from submissions that crossed that line. If you need something more permanent than the standard obituary, the Intelligencer offers memorial advertisements that can run for multiple weeks. These are separate from the obituary section and are priced differently. A weekly memorial ad can cost anywhere from $150 to $400 depending on size and frequency. Some families use this approach when the death happens close to a holiday or during a period when they know the family will be spread out and unable to gather quickly for a formal service. The submission process itself is straightforward enough. You prepare the text, gather the required documents including the death certificate or a certification from the funeral director, and submit through their online portal or by phone. The online portal accepts PDF attachments for photos. JPEG files are also fine but PDF tends to preserve quality better through their layout system. Resolution should be at least 300 DPI. Anything lower and the printed image comes out blurry, and there is no fixing that once it is in production.
Get the Full Details
I have also noticed that the obituaries tend to follow a fairly consistent structure that local families seem to expect. It usually opens with the full legal name, age, city of residence, and date of death. Then comes biographical information in roughly chronological order: birth, education, career, marriage, children, memberships. The surviving family list comes last. Deviating from this structure is allowed but not common, and editors sometimes reorganize submissions that look too different from the norm. This is not written policy. It is just editorial practice that has developed over decades. If you are preparing an obituary and want it to reflect someone's actual life rather than a template, the best approach is to collect specific details before you write. Job titles with company names matter. Specific dates of military deployment or unit assignments add credibility. Church names and pastoral relationships are almost always included. These details are what separate a generic death notice from something that actually honors a person. The Intelligencer's obituary section has built its reputation on that kind of specificity, and the families who invest time in getting it right tend to be the ones whose pieces get remembered. One final practical note. If you are submitting on behalf of someone else, make sure you have explicit permission from the immediate family. The Intelligencer does not verify this, but editors have asked for confirmation in borderline cases, particularly when the deceased had complex family situations or when there are disputes about the wording. Having a quick text message or email from the primary next of kin approving the submission can resolve these issues before they become problems. It took me a while to learn that, and I wish I had known it from the start.
