NewsBeat

September 2022 NewsBeat 23 good step in making "the paper" into "my paper." News media can spend thousands of dol- lars in promotional programs and efforts to gain or retain a news audience, but such efforts can't match being with a family, even in such perfunctory ways as doing an obit on a loved one. (At the Des Moines Register in those days, reporter Nick Lamberto was well-regarded for his ability to deal with families in times of grief. And few if any counties are blessed with a medical examiner or coroner as sen- sitive and as caring as Polk County's R.C. Wooters was.) So one cost of moving to paid obituaries is weakening the newspaper's bond to the community. Another is a loss of learning among young reporters. Look, if you know families will likely keep what you're writing in scrapbooks, or laminate the piece to preserve it as part of the family's history, you will feel intense pressure to get the details right. A mis- take in an obit cannot be remedied with an apology or a brief correction in the next day's paper. Sometimes, the phone call to the family alerted the reporter to an error in the funeral home's notice. Further, writing obituaries forced report- ers to work through the stress of asking the family about the deceased person's life. That experience helped them become more persistent when a public official was hesi- tant to answer a question that was far less intrusive, related to some other story. Finally, when you have to summarize a person's life in about five or six column inches—talk about the need for tight writ- ing! So obituaries are good practice for all journalists, but particularly so for less ex- perienced reporters. The task drives home the importance of accuracy and the need to ask questions in tough times. You also learn how fragile life is. Since The Bee published every day, that included Christmas. When I worked one holiday shift, the "dead board" included a young man who on Christmas Eve day had left his wife and their infant child to buy some milk for the baby. I ended up talking with the young widow after her husband was hit and killed by a drunk driver. That obit from the early 1960s still resonated with me years later, when I was a university administrator and my depart- ment or school was again subjected to some "strategic planning." Calls to mind the Public Enemy album, based on a Yiddish proverb: Man Plans, God Laughs. Doing obits puts you into life and death situations, far more than rewriting press releases and the like. When the Des Moines Register moved to paid obits starting March 11, 2003, then editor Paul Anger assured readers in a February 28 announcement, "Families and funeral homes will continue to receive caring attention from the Register." (He left the paper to go to the Detroit Free Press in 2005.) Contrary to Paul's hopes, nowadays the handling of paid obits is at the corporate or Gannett level. When I phoned about a paid obit for the paper, it was handled accept- ably. But the first question I was asked was, "And what paper do you want the obituary to appear in?" Just another cost of going the paid obit route. This artically was originally published on the Iowa political website Bleeding Heart- land. Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000. In the 1963-64 school year, Herb Strentz was working toward his M.A. in the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse and had a graduate assistantship with the New York Press Association. After getting the master's he worked in the AP Albany bureau before beginning PhD work at Northwestern. Relevance Project offers sales advice from veteran trainer The Relevance Project, an initiative of Newspaper Association Managers, has add- ed a series of advertising advice columns to its online resources. John Foust, a veteran trainer, has pro- vided a set of six columns to the Relevance Project. Foust's advice has appeared in association publications and accompanied his programs conducted for thousands of newspaper advertising professionals. Use the set of six, available in full at https:// relevanceprojectnet.wordpress.com/ revenue-resource-2020/, to capture new revenue or to spark an in-house training session.

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