News Reporting 101 sounds exciting.
It wasn’t. Mostly, we wrote obituaries. Because that was quite likely what we would be doing if we managed to land a job on a newspaper.
Dr. Evarts would be the funeral director. We would pretend to call her, and she would tell us about the deceased. Then we would write their obit.
A misspelled name on an assignment meant an automatic F. So, Dr. Evarts liked to include some “creative” spellings among the survivors' names. Otherwise, the formula was pretty much the same. Name of the deceased, high points of their life. Plans for memorials. Names of surviving family members, sometimes spelled unconventionally, because Dr. Evarts kind of liked failing people.
The only obituary I ever wanted to write was hers.
I would have paid for the privilege, and I would have had to bid on the job
A friend died recently. I posted her obituary online, with some reluctance. It was a garbled mess.
My friend was seriously ill. But she was supposed to recover. Except that didn’t happen. She died very suddenly, and unexpectedly, shortly after being released from the hospital.
The obituary was written by her father, during the worst time in his life. Not surprisingly, it was difficult to read and left out a lot of pertinent details.
The modern obituary is published online. With so many daily papers dying, funeral directors have eliminated the middle man, and publish them themselves.
Instead of a family member giving the funeral director information about their departed relation, and the funeral director passing this along to some recent graduate of a journalism school, the family member writes the memorial, and the funeral director publishes it on a web page.
There is, usually, a nice photograph of the deceased. People can post messages about their departed friend, and they can, if they like send a card to the bereaved. (It will cost about twice what it would to buy a card and mail it.) They can also send flowers or plant a tree, if they’re willing to spend the money.
In a year, the obituary will pop up in your inbox again. You can post another message, send a card, send flowers, plant a tree.
It is, in short, another way for the funeral director to make some money.
The daily newspapers brought us the big stories from the world’s capitols. They told us what our governments, federal, state and local were doing. They told us about crime, and problems with trash pickup, and fires, and changes in local neighborhoods.
They also let us know who died, who was engaged, who was getting married.
They squeezed a lot of news into 35 pages, along with Dear Abby, Peanuts, Art Buchwald and movie listings.
Now they’re gone.
The evening news shows me lots of fires and crime news and traffic accidents, because they’re good television.
I get NPR. They do more local news than I can get on the networks.
Then there’s the internet, where some of what I read is actually true.
But the lesser news, that I would have found on back pages of the “Post-Gazette”, may or may not turn up in my inbox.
The “Pittsburgh Post-Gazette”, a local institution for almost 200 years, will stop publishing in May. The paper was taken over by a right wing consortium. They endorsed Trump in 2016. It was an insane move, publishing a Republican paper in a town where the mayor is chosen in the Democratic primary. Not surprisingly, the paper is folding.
But it’s a huge loss, as is the loss of all the great dailies, up and down the United States. We lose the in depth coverage, only print journalism could provide. We also lose the small stories. The news that was less than earth shaking, but important to the ordinary readers, who enjoyed the paper at breakfast, or on the bus to work, and, these days, are playing Royal Kingdom on their phones.
For those of us getting older, it may be wise to do a web search on our friends and family every day, as we don’t get the paper anymore.
Dr. Evarts would have a coronary if she saw some of the homemade obituaries that are posted online. That’s a small consolation, I suppose, but a very small one.
