The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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Tag Archives: obituaries

Not dead yet (add end)

During the fall, I wrote here several times about the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill, whose students studied obituaries both as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue. The class was sponsored by Legacy.com, the Evanston-based company that partners with hundreds of newspapers to host their online death notices, and at the end of the term Legacy received specific recommendations that went beyond the class’s white paper, “The State of the American Obituary.”

This week, on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released those recommendations to the industry at large: a report entitled “Transforming the Obituary Landscape.” that contains their findings (use the previous link to download a copy).  Rich Gordon, with whom I led the project, published his assessment of the opportunity and challenges on Poynter.org.  And as detailed in this Medill press release, Legacy announced its reaction to and decisions on implementing the recommendations (these are also detailed on obitresearch.com).

Though I am on the Legacy board, I was not involved in any way with management’s decisions on which parts of the recommendations should be implemented.  On balance, switching back and forth between my board hat and professor hat, I can support the student rationales for why each recommendation was made, and the Legacy rationales for the choices it made.  Rich Gordon’s post is probably the best place to go for a nuanced overall point of view, so here is yet another link so you don’t have to scroll up to go there.

Obit geek that I am, I see plenty of upside in the obituary and death notice category – for all involved. Not dead yet, indeed.

Not dead yet, but for how much longer?

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, the students of the fall Interactive Innovation Project at Medill have been studying the past, assessing the present, and projecting the future of obituaries as a form of journalism and as a source of audience and revenue for publishers. Today on its Web site, obitresearch.com, the class released a white paper, “The State of the American Obituary,” that contains their findings.

They report that the central position that newspapers have held in communicating the news of Americans’ deaths is substantially threatened by changes in technology and audience behavior. Unlike other categories of aggregated listings, this is an area where newspapers today still retain a dominant market share.  In fact, Legacy.com Inc. – the Evanston-based aggregator of newspaper death notices that sponsored the research project, and where (disclosure) I am an independent board member – hosts death notices for 7 of every 10 Americans who die each year.

The class found that new user- and family-driven forms of remembering the dead, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace as well as standalone memorial sites and services, are attracting audience members who want not only to read about their friends and loved ones, but also to participate in their memorialization. While this began happening as soon as the first Web browsers appeared, the growth of social media, particularly among the Baby Boom generation, is causing an acceleration.

In preparing their report, the eight students who worked on this project conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys, reviewed scholarly and industry research, and conducted interviews with employees at newspapers nationwide. Based on their findings, they conclude with recommendations to media stakeholders on how to adapt to the many changes in the landscape of grieving, remembering and memorializing the dead.

You can download the report here. It was principally written and edited by Ashley Bates, Ian Monroe, and Ming Zhuang.  Contributing researchers were Jake Bressler, Alina Dain, Chris Deaton, Tiffany Glick, and Kate Goshorn.