An obituary attempts to sometimes give an account of the texture and significance of the life of someone who has recently died. It is to be distinguished from a death notice (also known as a funeral notice), which is a paid advertisement written by family members and placed in the newspaper either by the family or the funeral home. [1]
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Writing obituaries
Many news organizations have on file pre-written obituaries for notable individuals who are still alive; allowing detailed, authoritative - and lengthy - obituaries to appear very quickly after these people die. Occasionally the author of an obituary will die before its subject. For example, Walter Sullivan's obituary of the noted physicist James Van Allen was published by the AP after Van Allen's death in 2006, even though Sullivan predeceased Van Allen by almost a decade.[1] In 2006, Bill McDonald of the New York Times answered readers' questions about obituaries as part of the Times's Talk to the Newsroom feature. He confirmed that the Times had over 1,200 obituaries on file, some written as far back as 1982. He also said that the Times's policy was to always give the cause of death when available and, since the publication of a premature obituary for Katharine Sergava, to also always identify the person who advised the newspaper of the death. The hope was that attribution would reduce the chance of another embarrassing and (to the family) painful error. [2] An online podcast network from India interviewed Ann Wroe [3], The Economist's Briefings and Obituaries Editor on the craft of Obituary writing. here to get to the page to download the podcast.
Premature obituaries
- Main article: List of premature obituaries
By definition, obituaries should always be posthumous. But occasionally obituaries are published, either accidentally or intentionally, while the person concerned is still alive. Most are due to hoaxes, confusions between people with similar names, or the unexpected survival of someone who was close to death. Some others are published because of miscommunication between newspapers, family members and the funeral home, often resulting in embarrassment for everyone involved. Irish author Brendan Behan said that there is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary. In this regard, some people will seek to have an unsuspecting newspaper editor publish a premature death notice or obituary as a malicious hoax, perhaps to gain revenge on the "deceased". To that end, nearly all newspapers now have policies requiring that death notices come from a reliable source (such as a funeral home), though even this has not stopped some pranksters such as Alan Abel.
Obituaries are a notable feature of The Economist, which publishes precisely one full-page obituary per week, reflecting on the subject's life and influence on world history. Past subjects have ranged from Ray Charles to Uday Hussein. The British Medical Journal encourages doctors to write their own obituaries for publication after their death. Pan Books publishes a series called The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries, which are anthologies of obituaries under a common theme, such as military obituaries, sports obituaries, heroes and adventurers, entertainers, rogues, eccentric lives, etc.
See also
References
- ^ "Talk to the Newsroom: Obituaries Editor Bill McDonald", [[New York Times]], September 25, 2006. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "The paid notices are classified ads. They're gathered and placed in the paper or on the Web by the classified advertising department, which operates independently of the news department. Because they generate revenue, the paid notices get as much space as they need. We, on the news side, who only spend revenue, are generally promised three columns of a six-column page: half the page, that is, in various configurations. Sometimes it's less, sometimes more, depending on how many ads are sold."
External links
- Obiturary Resources
- The Times Great Lives: A Century in Obituaries
- The Times Great Victorian Lives
- The National Hall of Records Online Repository for Obituaries and Death Records
- The Smoking Gun: CNN.com premature obituaries
- Obituaries Research Guide - tips for finding obituaries
- "How To Write An Obituary - A Step-by-Step Guide"
Further reading
- Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, And The Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries, Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-060758-76-7
- Alana Baranick, Jim Sheeler, and Stephen Miller, Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers, Marion Street Press, ISBN 1-933338-02-4
- Hugh Massingberd, Daydream Believer: Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper (London: Macmillan, 2001), p.245.
