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.'"
Every respectful person... (Score:4, Funny)
Every respectful person is sure to twitter his or her death as it's happening.
Re:Every respectful person... (Score:5, Funny)
Her heart sank down and down, there was no bottom to death, she couldn’t come to the end of it. The blue light from Cornelia’s lampshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny laid curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up. God, give a sign!
For a second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this – I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath, took out her cell phone, and fired off a quick tweet.
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Pulse sensor connected via BT with smartphone, which can send preset message to twitter? That's...easily doable.
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prone to error, but hey, who can knock the living dead?
All hail zombies everywhere!
Yup, all the more fun ;>
And TBH I'm kinda awaiting unobtrusive logging and monitoring of (many) vital signs, round the clock...
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I think hypochondriacs find enough of causes to worry already...
But yeah, that's what I mean - health monitoring; so important changes won't go easily unnoticed and help will be immediatelly dispatched in a case of emergency.
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I'd actually love to see one that was affordable, easy to wear, and trackable on the computer. Not that I've looked very hard, so someone may already know of one. rrdtool graphs of heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature would be interesting. I'm not much of a hypochondriac. Actually, I usually ignore the fact that I'm not feeling well. A few times, people have told me "you look like shit, are you sick?" and sure enough when I actually check I have a fever. When I've been really si
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They'll be pricing themselves out of the market (Score:2, Insightful)
"...which proposed charging $450 for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice"
I'm sure a web site would be more than happy to take over their business for, let's say, $45 a day for listing 1820 words, and the web site will still make money at it.
Re:They'll be pricing themselves out of the market (Score:4, Funny)
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Craigslist.com/obituaries would overtake newspaper obituaries in about 6 months. Why have they not done this yet? A nominal fee to prevent pranksters and they'll dominate the market in no time.
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Just pay a Nigerian Spammer $5 and they'll post a death notice to everyone's mailbox!
And claim that you left 14 million dollars in a secret bank account that they need help retrieving.
It doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, newspapers are dead - Netcraft just confirmed it.
Why publish a death notice? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why in the world would someone publish a death notice in the first place? Is it some sort of legal requirement? If not, I don't understand the thought processes that would lead someone to want to do such a thing.
Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be required for estate or other legal purposes. And, as another poster noted, it's traditional and some people expect it. Didn't realize they were so expensive, but dammnit, dying ain't cheap these days. Nothing is.
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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 bett
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I think I'll just request to be buried in my car, in that case. Volkssarg. It's even got AC, and a CD player.
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Costco sells respectable looking ones for a little under $1,000. Don't know if you have to buy a 3-pack, though.
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Nah, they're just really, really big. ;)
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It costs roughly $15,000 to be put in the ground properly. I've read news reports where families have known that a family member has died, but they've refused to claim the body because they couldn't afford to bury them.
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$500 for 4'x7'? I think I will cut that down by requesting to be buried vertically to save space.
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Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me set the stage for you. You're an old man. Once, you lived in a "neighborhood", which is a place where you know and hang out with people who live and work next door. But as you got older, you moved away, into a retirement or nursing home.
Then you died. You know thousands of people face-to-face by name, who'd like to know that you're no longer around. How does your family let them know? For this generation, the answer is *not* "Facebook".
I swear, the concept of face-to-face friendship is so foreign to young people today, our society is starting to look like Asimov's "The Naked Sun".
But anyway, any business whose primary profit center comes from people who'll be dead in a few years is in trouble.
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Nursing homes?
Funeral houses?
Grave diggers?
They seem to be doing fine...
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Your family individually, personally contacts the people they know were close to you. Those people fill in the gaps. No, it's not fun. But it's necessary. I've done it. I'll probably be doing it again in a few years.
If actually know somebody well enough to really care if they've died, it's pretty cold to have to read about it in the newspaper. And it's pretty lazy to use the newspaper as an escape hatch.
The good news is that you can do a lot of it by e-mail. An awful lot of older people use e-mail the
Re:Why publish a death notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
But with everything that happens when someone passes away, it's damn hard to remember everybody and even harder to get ahold of everyone. Especially when you're having to get burial plots, caskets, and all the other stuff that goes on. Especially if the person was highly connected and you had been away for quite some time. I saw it with my mother. She was one of those people who knew a lot of people. I certainly didn't know them all.
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Solution:
Make an online script (I dunno, someplace called "Am I dead yet?").
Log in every couple of days, check "I'm not dead yet!"
Use the much cheaper "e-mail marketing" services to notify your relatives immediately if the box hasn't been checked in 48 hours.
Make sure that no greedy relatives or old arch-nemeses change your password. These matters are irreversible under normal means.
???
Profit!
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I thought about this for various reasons. Death notices. Layoff scripts (i.e., do damage if you don't check in). It's all a good idea until some error comes along. What happens if the server reboots and the time is set to something outrageously wrong? Or someone goes and manually resets the time. What if you go on a trip and find it impossible to check in. It's a bit embarrassing for family and friends to get the note. It may be a bit hard to take back after it's sent.
T
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People move and contacts are lost. While immediate friends and family can usually be telephoned, it's likely you will have missed quite a few people. Old school friends and colleagues are often a very touching attendants to funeral and memorial services, especially when they can tell you of memories of the persons life you never heard before.
e-mail is certainly what I call the lazy option. While we do hear a lot about the silver surfer generation in the media, the majority of people are probably still compl
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So, the need to propagate such news (from a disposal home) through a newspaper and not by, say, word of mouth...is actually a testament of better face-to-face friendships or relations generally?
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Bollocks. When my uncle died, his sons called all the people in his phone book. This way it costs way less than $450 and people won't miss it if they don't happen to read the obituary of the same edition of the same newspaper you happen to choose.
[citation needed]
I find that my peers tend to know way more people face-to-face than guys in their 30s when the Internet basically didn't exist here in Portugal. Yes, they may only k
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Thanks for the followup. My grandfather was in a situation like you described. He was moved to an assisted living home near my parents house, far from where his home used to be. When he passed away, my parent's contacted his old friends and acquaintances from where he lived to let them know and give them the funeral information. I don't know if they published anything in the paper, but I will ask them now. I can't imagine depending on someone reading the paper to know a friend of theirs has died. Contacting
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Huh? How are newspapers "face-to-face" at all? Using a newspaper to notify friends and family of one's death is what is baffling people (including me, seems so impersonal) here...
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So then you can go to the funeral. Which is you know. FACE TO FACE!
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The issue isn't friends and family, it's your former neighbors, the lady who worked at your bank, casual coworkers from a job you retired from ten years ago. People who'd like to know, but whom your heirs wouldn't think to call.
Newspapers aren't face-to-face, of course, but death notices are designed to solve a notification problem that only exists if your relationships are primarily face-to-face.
Us young people (I'm 37) would use Facebook or something to handle this today: all in all it's a better solutio
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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.
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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.
Why would they want a newspaper clipping when they could call the foreign Office of Births Deaths and Marriages for an actual authoritative verification of the death?
Even, then it seems that verifying your story is probably a waste of their time:
How do they know you didn't just pick a random obit in your destination city's newspaper and claim that as your reason for needing a passport ASAP?
Or use an obit in your local newspaper so you can claim that as your reason for cancelling a flight?
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so people with whom the deceased lost contact can know what happened and get back in touch with the family
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If obituary websites keep their "death databases", it may be even easier in the future. On the other hand, everyone's saying this will a "dark age" in the future...
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> If obituary websites keep their "death databases", it may be even easier in the future.
They don't. This is why the government keeps these records for as long as possible (well over a century, in some cases, thanks to microfiche). Even if the home town dries up and blows away, the county keeps on, and usually takes over the records of lost towns, villages, etc., as part of any disencorporation process.
Cost per word (Score:2)
Legacy.com isn't a solution (Score:2, Informative)
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Every major newspaper in the country keeps an archive nowadays, and libraries still, traditionally, keep active subscriptions to local papers. In addition, almost all papers still microfilm their editions, and the papers, some libraries, the LOC (usually), and the microfilming companies themselves all keep copies. It's possible it'll disappear, eventually, but compared to a website like legacy.com, it's solid.
Next to go, legal notices (Score:3, Interesting)
Many print newspapers carry "legal notices", of D/B/A names, incorporations, and such. As non-searchable information, that's almost useless. But it's a big profit center for many newspapers, which are fighting to keep it. [74.125.155.132](Google cache of Michigan Press Association, whose web site is down)
On the other hand, if governments don't require that information to be published, they should maintain the database (which they will have anyway for internal purposes) and offer free access. D/B/A names in the United States are handled at the county level, and that data can be hard to obtain on line. There are commercial services that collect it, expensively. Considering that the amount of data is small by modern standards (all the data for the US will fit on a DVD), it's not a high-cost item.
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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 req
Can't they just combine obituaries with some ads (Score:2)
thus decreasing the cost.
Something like this: Bozo Mortuary Services: We put "Fun" back to Funerals.
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Ever looked at an obit page in a real physical paper? They're full of ads for elderly medical products, retirement communities, etc.
Most papers have more taste than to advertise funeral homes on the same page, but they're definitely taking advantage of this.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls... (Score:2)
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Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
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Even better: I misread this as an obituary for obituaries of newspapers. There has to be some contrarian out there who is writing that newspapers are here to stay...
This was my first reading as well.
What about social network sites (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought social network sites are/will be a good solution for this. You don't even have to know the password of the dead one to query his/her friends. (But I guess you could get even the password if you prove the site owners that you're the closest relative of the dead one.)
They're not alone either (Score:5, Interesting)
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They are supposed to be discounts, but they don't necessarily keep up with the pace of the standard ticket rates. At a different time of year he may have saved a couple hundred bucks with the bereavement rate.
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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.
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This.
The two tickets are not comparable--you are getting a discount on the open-ended ticket, which is quite expensive on most airlines. As parent says if you have fixed dates, the online price is the best deal you are going to get but is full of restrictions, with a notable exception being Southwest Airlines.
More here [consumerist.com], in the comments.
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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.
Publish it on Slashdot like I did (Score:5, Interesting)
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You sir, have my vote as the coolest brother ever!
I don't know how I missed the original /. article, but I just checked both links...OUTSTANDING!
Please accept my belated condolences, as I'm sure you loved him very much to something this neat for him. :-)
I know from experience that you probably encountered resistance from some of the family to pull this off. Glad you stuck to you guns.
I caused an inter-family feud when I scattered my grandfather's ashes at his favorite fishing hole. That was his last request
Obituaries (Side Story) (Score:3, Interesting)
I was at a rummage sale looking around, when I spotted a rather spiffy blue briefcase. After purchasing it, I took it home and was loading it with a few things when I noticed a small square of paper. It was the obituary for the person who had owned it before. Talk about creepy.
Printed media is dying (Score:2, Insightful)
The newspapers are dying in it's today's form, not just the death notice market. I know that it will not happen tomorrow nor in the next 5 years, but it will eventually, as more and more people reads the news on the Internet. And the question here is not just the price (zero x something), but timing. In the past, you would need to wait until the next day to read about some big news in depth, as TV news tend to be just a highlight of the situation. But now? 5 minutes after anything happens you can track the
Obits.com exists... (Score:2)
...but isn't doing the obvious thing: running an ad-supported site on which obits can be posted for free.
The whole "Death Care Industry" is based on it. (Score:2)
The exploitation of grieving survivors is how funeral homes stay in business. $9k coffin? $2k floral arrangements? It's ridiculous. They know that people want to express their love and affection for the dead and convince them that they only way they can do that is to spend money on a bunch of expensive bullshit.
LK
Old one, but (almost) On Topic. (Score:3, Funny)
"Ten pounds per word." comes the reply.
"A little steep," says Sarah, "but at times like these it can't be helped - just write 'Manny's Dead'"
"Sorry madam, but we have a fifty pound minimum charge"
"Hmmm...Ok, well could you put 'Manny's Dead. Volvo for Sale.'?"
Re:Huge audience driver? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, when you get Gray hair, it becomes a popular pastime. Believe it or not, people used to live in things called Communities, and sometimes, they'd recognize a name in the paper, because they Knew People.
I know, I can't believe it either. How wierd.
and to take it a step further... (Score:5, Insightful)
SF is largely transient. It isn't made up of longstanding communities anymore. Neighborhoods, yes. Communities, not so much. It's largely a young person's town, and most of the young people who live in SF aren't from there. No different than NYC (or any other large, attractive city), I guess.
I think the only places where tightly knit communities would still want that sort of service are mostly small towns, where families and friends still actually commune together. Most suburbs aren't that sort of community either - they're places people go to sleep after working too many hours in another suburb or city.
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Re:and to take it a step further... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that suburbanites put their obits in the main city paper (or papers - still a few cities with two majors, for various reasons), not in the local upgraded PennySaver. And yes, I write from experience.
As far as obits and young/transient cities go, I doubt that the survivors of the transients put obits in the (frex) SF paper, but instead put them in their home town papers, if anywhere.
Or places that used to attract people, like Detroit or Pittsburgh, where there is still a core of non-movers who act as contact points for those who left.
If you come to San Francisco... (Score:2)
... be sure to wear some Craigslist in your hair.
Re:and to take it a step further... (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider Craigslist vs. Ebay: Ebay wasn't a particularly mortal threat to classifieds(probably didn't help; but didn't seal their doom) because it tried to largely ignore location. That works fine for stuff that is quite valuable per unit weight, or obscure stuff that you can't get just anywhere, so you just have to suck up the shipping, or for stuff that is all shipped anyway, so cutting out the middleman is helpful.
Craigslist, on the other hand, has all the cheapness of being web based; but is explicitly location-centric. And it crushed the classifieds business like a bug(as with most bugs, the crushed remains are still crawling and twitching a bit, bugs are tough motherfuckers; but it is basically game over.)
It wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery to build a nationwide; but location-focused obituary mechanism. Once the present crop of old people are finished dying, it is not going to be pretty for the paper obituaries...
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I live in SF, and when I had a family member in an other part of the country pass away I discovered the the SF Chronicle had two different rates, one much higher for death notices for non-residents. ($750 vs $250 for residents if I remember correctly, though this was a dozen years ago.) I would guess its similar for most large city newspapers to keep the size of the death notice page reasonable while still getting as much income as possible.
Re:Huge audience driver? (Score:4, Insightful)
I still live in a community - have parties with my neighbors on a regular basis, even. But that doesn't mean I'm going to morbidly look in obituaries every day to see if one of them died - because, you know, I'm actually still *in touch* with my friends, so if one died I'd know about it...I wouldn't need to read about it in the paper.
Re:Huge audience driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in my 30's and get the paper around here for just that. Because you do lose touch with friends. In the last 2 years I've had 3 friends die from cancer and one commit suicide. All good friends that I went to school with, it's not just the grey hair folks but those of us who have strong community ties. If I walked downtown, nearly every shopkeeper would greet me by name.
As well, the costs of these things are...insane. 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.
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There was a time when newspapers ran birth and death announcements for free ... as a community service.
Now they charge?
Its no wonder they are going under, its always good to kick people when their down.
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Most newspapers still run free obituaries as well as paid death notices. But the free versions are generally limited in the types of information contain, and as newspapers have cut back on their size they've also reduced the amount of detail the obits contain. At the newspaper where I work, it's pretty much name, age, where the person lived and when and where the funeral is. (Some of the really big papers have eliminated the free ones altogether).
The paid death notices, on the other hand, function more like
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So why the need for the paper if it's such a community?
Or maybe the papers just found a way to extract money from something which, over time, was established as a proper thing to do? (to be fair, predatory practices around funerals are rampant all around)
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So why the need for the paper if it's such a community?
Why do you think they have to charge $450 for a death notice? I'll go ahead and tell you since you should have gotten it as soon as you asked your question: it's because they aren't making squat on subscriptions because hardly anybody reads the paper any more!
The latest New York Times commercial highlights the Style and Travel sections as primary selling points for their paper, they don't even mention any news. Nobody buys a paper for the news any more, because it's already a day late and a dollar short by
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...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
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I've seen that here on the other side of the country. I don't remember precisely how much it was though. I think my first estimate was $500, and they lowered it to $150 by trimming a few words and sweet talking the boss. Of course we "just got in, in time". We didn't have much of a choice. We were notified that the coroner was releasing his body after the autopsy, and the funeral home said it would be two days later. It could either go in that day for the paper the next day, or there w
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Registrar of Births Deaths and Marriages has, in UK at least, computerised records going back to 1930 something ...
No one NEEDS to go trawling through old newspapers anymore looking to see who has died.
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Bah, everyone on my profiles has at least met me. Then again, most of them knew me from high school. Like, they knew my name, but probably never even talked to me. It's a collection of people who could care less if I kicked it.
In reality, all those who care will be there when I die. The only question will be, will I stay alive long enough for them to all stab me in the back.
Et tu, Brute?
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My wife's friend from high school died in a car accident a few weeks ago. She learnt about it on Facebook. All that's changed is the medium.
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they'd recognize a name in the paper, because they Knew People.
It's even crazier than that. They knew people by their real name. It's positively stone age!
and some folks look for their own Obit (Score:3, Funny)
if they are not in the paper they then continue on their day
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It's actually one of the prime reasons my father purchases a newspaper.
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It's called "apartment hunting".
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Me wonders how much the newspapers will charge themselves for documenting their own demise.
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Re:Nerdly Expectations and Requirements (Score:4, Funny)
He's just spending a year or two dead for tax purposes.
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What an odd coincidence, I've sent notes to the IRS for the last 15 years saying "I died, I'm not paying you anything."
They keep sending notes back, "No you're not, and now you owe us more interest."
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
http://www.xkcd.com/686/ [xkcd.com]
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