Unlike circulation totals and advertising revenue, obituaries in newspapers are not dying, according to a recent research project by Medill graduate students.
The report, “The State of the American Obituary,” consisted of a quarter-long study of obituaries, death notices and online memorials by students in the fall Interactive Innovation Project course.
The findings are a timely resource for the newspaper industry and its partners, said Rich Gordon, a Medill professor and faculty advisor for the project.
“I came away believing that we did this project at the right moment,” he said. “If the newspaper industry is going to maintain its position as the first place that people look for obituaries, the time is right now to start doing something about it.”
The study has attracted attention from members of news industries around the world, said Prof. Owen Youngman, who also advised the research.
The project had both academic and advisory purposes. It aimed to assess the current state of editorial obituaries and death notices and provide an updated, comprehensive study on the topic, Youngman said. It also offered recommendations to its sponsor, Legacy.com, an online media company that gathers obituaries from more than 750 newspapers and publishes 70 percent of deaths in the U.S.
Ian Monroe, Medill ’09, a member of the research team and a principal author of the first report, said he was surprised by some of the findings, especially how death notices and classified ads have evolved differently.
“Classified ads are moving online, but obituaries are very newspaper-centric,” he said.
People who are most interested in obituaries and death notices tend to be older and less comfortable with online content, especially the social networking sites younger people sometimes use to memorialize the deceased, Monroe said.
The findings have both short- and long-term implications for the world of obituaries and death notices, Monroe said. Newspapers need to continue to put resources into these sections while they still have an advantage over online-only competitors, he said. But in the long term, print media needs to recognize obituaries will move online.
“As my generation gets older and we start dealing with the deaths of our loved ones, the context that will feel natural to us is online,” Monroe said.
For this reason, Monroe said Web sites like Legacy.com should not only offer electronic versions of newspaper obituaries but should use multimedia to meet the needs of the next generation of obituary readers.
The second report to advise the current dominant players in the obituary and death-notice market on how to maintain their competitive advantage will be published by the same group in a few months, Gordon said.[email protected]
