Newspaper Death Notices May Be a Dying Business 171
Hugh Pickens writes "Alan D. Mutter writes in his journalism blog 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' that some newspapers exploit bereaved families with exorbitantly priced death notices — a distasteful and strategically inept way for them to try to make ends meet. 'I stumbled across the problem this week when I tried to buy a death notice in ... the San Francisco Chronicle, which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice,' writes Mutter. But lose the death notice business, and newspapers risk losing a huge audience driver as well. The solution may be partnering with websites like Legacy.com, a site that already publishes death notices for about two-thirds of the people who die each day in the US. 'It may not be easy to figure out the terms of a broader collaboration, writes Rich Gordon on Poynter.org, 'partly because some newspaper executives are wary of Legacy and feel the company could become a competitive threat for audiences and revenue. But this is exactly the reaction many newspaper executives had to collaborating with Internet companies in other classified advertising categories. I'd hate to see newspapers make the same mistake with death notices and obituaries.'"
Legacy.com isn't a solution (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:2, Informative)
Nursing homes?
Funeral houses?
Grave diggers?
They seem to be doing fine...
Re:Next to go, legal notices (Score:3, Informative)
I'm amused that the Michigan Press Association used an address in Missouri for their correspondence.
I don't think the cost of that information is about the quantity, it's about having to collect information from 3140 county clerk offices and transcribing them reliably into digital format, or if they are in digital format, converting possibly numerous digital formats into one harmonized format can cost a lot of money.
I've filed for a couple DBAs with the county and an LLC with the state, there wasn't any requirement on my part to publish that information that I've seen, if they are posted somewhere by the respective clerk's offices, then I haven't seen or heard of it.
Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes
In order to get a passport quickly to fly to a funeral, or to cancel a flight or trip, you often need a clip from a newspaper to proove the death actually happened.
Re:and to take it a step further... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:3, Informative)
A coffin can easily cost as much as a car. I had to help pick one out once for a friend.
They had one 'cheapo' model for $995 that was barely a step up from a wooden box. The rest of the 30 coffin models they had ranged from $3995 to $21,995. Only two models were under $5,000 and they only came in white or brown.
Add in the cost for the cement tomb most cemeteries require around a coffin now ($1500), mortuary expenses of $1200 and various other fees for the death certificate and copies, etc...
You feel better to hear the cemetery plot is only about $500 for a 4'x7' piece of land, until you realize thats $777,857 an acre.
Add in the cost of the actual funeral and you can easily spend $15,000 or more just to die.
Flip side - cremation is still a bargain at $525 plus $50 for the death certificate.
Same here in Europe (Score:1, Informative)
I live in Finland, one of my parents died some time back and we ended up paying about 700 euro (1000 usd) to run his death notice in two local and small papers (3000 and 7000 readership). Here you also put an ad in the paper for newborns, but what newspapers do is that they charge almost nothing for that since those are considered to draw valuable (=young) readership.
Re:They're not alone either (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Huge audience driver? (Score:3, Informative)
...My grandfather who was rather well known in the community died 2 years ago. To run his obituary in 3 of the local/nearby community papers ran around $800.
When my mother died last year, I found that running a 2-day notice in the local community paper in the South was $1000. This was a low cost area with a total population less than 5% the size of San Francisco. Shocked by the astonishing price, I estimated what they were taking in annually from death notices, and found that it was probably enough to cover most of their operating expenses.
But there really is no other effective way to get the word out on someone's passing to the community in a timely manner, so the local newspaper has become part of the high-cost for-profit funeral industry, something I had not even suspected.
Re:They're not alone either (Score:3, Informative)
For the ticket prices you found, you probably had to schedule the return trip at the same time. Usually, the bereavement fare allows an open-ended return, meaning you have already paid for it but do not have to schedule it yet, so you have time to get affairs in order when you don't know in advance how long that will take. On the other hand, if you know you don't have to help get affairs in order and know when you will be returning, the bereavement fare is usually not the best deal.
Re:They're not alone either (Score:2, Informative)
I have used bereavement tickets 3 times (unfortunately). The difference is the bereavement discount is a discount off of a unrestricted ticket. The discount tickets you were looking at were almost certainly heavily restricted tickets.
My tickets were open ended and I was able to change flights times/days on my tickets without fee. Which is a huge help when you're uncertain of the length of stay. IIRC I paid $100-$200 more than the discount ticket on each occasion.
Re:let the newspapers die (Score:3, Informative)