Traumatic or personal way and glommed onto it. Maybe they were introduced to the page in a very emotional or These folk gather together in Usenet groups and on dead pool lists and all manner of morbid media channels. Readers who patrol the internet in search of the newly-dead. Marilyn Johnson, the author of “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” writes vididly about obits, obit writers and the surprisingly passionate tribe of obituary
#Nytimes obits update
The Times assigns a live body to update the obit and, in the case of Mel Gussow, offered a note to the reader acknowledging the status of the author. If it is by a writer who brings a certain authority to it.” “But in select cases,” he added, “we feel the obit is too fine to discard, particularly McDonald said that in most cases when an obit subject outlives the writer, The Times does a new piece.
Occasionally, the author of the obituary was already dead by the time the piece ran – Vincent Canby on Bob Hope and Mel Gussow on Elizabeth Taylor,
#Nytimes obits archive
Say, 50 – the archive is growing significantly.”īut he declined to tell me who the youngest on the list is, saying it’s “proprietary information.” About 90 percent of the obituaries that make the front page are prepared in advance. Even if you subtract the number of those we’ll publish in a given year – McDonald said The Times currently has 1,500 advance obits in the can – “and we’re adding about 250 a year. I asked about some recent notables and whether The Times had them ready in advance. We have one on….?’ Outsiders freely say it, but we happy and embattled few know how hard, and how impossible, this job ultimately is. But it’s a cardinal rule on the Obits desk never to say, ‘Why didn’t
McDonald: “Well, I often wish we had been smart enough, or clairvoyant enough, to have an obit prepared in advance. I asked whether he and his colleagues are often stuck without one and think, in retrospect, why on earth didn’t we have one for this person? Embarrassment-avoidance in a competitive environment is no small consideration.” And some people are so prominent that we have to consider our own risks Someone prominent and in a high-risk job may also deserve an advance. Old will be high on the to-do list someone prominent and ailing is, too. Think like an actuary (as well as a journalist and an amateur historian), taking into account prominence and significance, of course, but also life expectancy, health status and risk factors. “They essentially select themselves – high-profile people whose deaths will be major news and whose obits we’ll want to publish immediately. McDonald how the desk decides who should have one. He offers comments on obits in The Times and the differences in the ways The Times and the British press handle obituaries.įinally, I include a bit on dead pools and the people who follow obituaries with a surprisingly keen passion. Also look for a Q & A with Tim Bullamore,Īn award-winning obituary writer with the Daily Telegraph in London. Please read on for a brief discussion with Bill McDonald, the obituary editor, about advance obits, those pieces about the famous and influential that are prepared ahead of time. To bring a number of elements in so I would like to supplement the column with some additional stuff relating to obits, which I find to be one of the most interesting content elements in The Times. In Sunday’s column, I wrote about the obituaries in The New York Times.
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