Obituaries are the devil
The other day, the executive editor walked into the news meeting to relay an outrageous story about our obits. At my paper, our obits are paid, which means people can write as much as they want to about their dead relatives, including every boring hobby, trip or interest in their lives as well as list every person they ever met as surviors.
Anyway, as a result of them being paid, we do very limited editing to them, which drives some of us on the copy desk nuts. There are only so many times one can read an obit that uses three different abbreviations for Wisconsin in a single paragraph. We usually just change things like obious misspellings, PM to p.m. and the like.
So we had this obit for some woman and her husband was in the military. Being in the military, he wrote all the dates in military style: 10 June 1967, 5 December 1989, etc. Since this is unusual, the copy editor doing obits changed it to a standard style: June 10, 1967, December 5, 1989, you know, the way average people in America write dates.
After the obit ran, the funeral home called and said that it shouldn't have to pay the $60 for the obit because it wasn't published correctly. So now, we don't change anything in obits, which is really the funeral home's loss seeing as how one funeral home continually misspells its own name in the obits it submits.
I don't know how the payment issue was resolved, but at least I don't have to read poorly written, over long, boring obits anymore.
Anyway, as a result of them being paid, we do very limited editing to them, which drives some of us on the copy desk nuts. There are only so many times one can read an obit that uses three different abbreviations for Wisconsin in a single paragraph. We usually just change things like obious misspellings, PM to p.m. and the like.
So we had this obit for some woman and her husband was in the military. Being in the military, he wrote all the dates in military style: 10 June 1967, 5 December 1989, etc. Since this is unusual, the copy editor doing obits changed it to a standard style: June 10, 1967, December 5, 1989, you know, the way average people in America write dates.
After the obit ran, the funeral home called and said that it shouldn't have to pay the $60 for the obit because it wasn't published correctly. So now, we don't change anything in obits, which is really the funeral home's loss seeing as how one funeral home continually misspells its own name in the obits it submits.
I don't know how the payment issue was resolved, but at least I don't have to read poorly written, over long, boring obits anymore.
posted by Unknown at 9:42 PM
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