Writing Obituaries for Newspapers in an Art

A lot of local newspapers have to hire an individual employee to write obituaries--and I've applied for that particular job at my local newspaper before (but didn't get the job). In a local newspaper environment, you have to work at a desk and deal with the bereaved public face-to-face, which sounds like a depressing job...which it may be. But it also tests your customer service skills and ability to show empathy about the situation to the customer while also having the ability to gather pertinent information from the family member about the person who passed away. Of course, some people can't do customer service skills and write accurate information all at the same time. No wonder those jobs usually have fast turnover.

At least most of the job descriptions for local obituary writers seek out people with outstanding writing, grammar and spelling skills--even though a lot of people obviously fudge those facts on their resume. All you have to do is look at several articles in my local paper from supposedly college-educated reporter/journalists to see grammar, spelling and fact-checking errors aplenty. All told, though, it shows that writing obituaries is truly an artistic form in writing that probably has unfairly ended up in the "hack" category of all possible writing careers. While some undoubtedly would try to put their own style into writing a local obit (I know I'd be too tempted to)--you have to incorporate a certain form into it as you would for both local and national papers. Plus, you have to sometimes use exactly what a family member has written up while still forming it into proper structure. The basic form, of course, is stats, cause of death, biography, personal interests, survivors, whether a service will be held or not (many are electing not to now) and info on where to give for charitable donations.

In the national newspaper sense, though, they appear to treat writing obituaries as a stand-alone and higher literary calling--if dealing with similar situations to what the local newspaper arena does.