Vermont's Oldest Evening Newspaper To Start Charging For Obits

[Henry]

Something that is a big expense for families when a death occurs is posting an obituary in the Newspaper.  One local newspaper, The St. Albans Messenger has never charged to do this.  All you need do is send in your information and photo and they would put it in the paper.  Truly a wonderful service and we need to be grateful for their past service to many of us.

I was talking with a local Funeral Director last night and he tells me that starting February 1st, that will no longer be the case.

This is merely a sign of the times.  We have the Burlington Free Press, which is now a much smaller newspaper.  Somedays it is so light, you wonder if it is all there.  I believe the Rutland Herald or one of the newspapers down South is discontinuing and we have another local newspaper on line that in order to read it, you have to subscribe.

I do commend our St. Albans Messenger for their local news - I am sure our BFA Sports Teams are very appreciative of them also.

[NorthFairfaxBoy]

Henry,
To comment on how small the BFP is, I think it is papers over all.  The Tennessean (which serves metro Nashville pop:1.5 million roughly and a circulation of 170000) is equally as small as the BFP sometimes.  The Sunday edition is no bigger than the Sunday BFP, and most of it is advertisements and sale papers. Ironically they are both owned by Gannett.....

[formerfxfd15]

How come they charge for an obituary, but wedding announcements and birth announcements are both free?  That I just don't understand.

[mirjo]

I don't think any paper should charge for an obituary, regardless of the "times." I believe it's fair to say that the majority of obits are of elderly folks  who have led long productive lives many of whom have given plenty to their communities a little "none-prime" real estate in the news paper upon their death isn't going to break anyone's bank. I don't care what Emerson says. For the two or three that are printed daily in the SAM, I doubt it adds up to that much lost ad revenue, unless they charge outrageous rates.

Perhaps a solution would be to impose a maximum word length (for space) and charge for overages. That would leave the choice up to the family whether or not to throw in the kitchen sink or keep things simple and would allow the paper to have control over its space.

I know papers(large & small) all over the country are reportedly suffering and some have shut down their centuries old operations. It's unfortunate for many reasons...not the least of which being 1/2 the crap on the internet is exactly that: CRAP. With everybody and their brother and his girlfriend and her best friend's sister having the capability to have a web site/blog...then  everybody and their brother and his girlfriend and her best friend's sister start to think they are experts on everything and something.

It's often impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. making matters worse is the fact that the "information-age" and "instant gratification" decreased the time from an incident occurring to it hitting the airwaves to about  zero seconds and often the initial reports are not correct and there ends up being a great deal of wrong information going around.

I'm not saying that printed papers are perfect in their delivery of the news, b/c they clearly are not,  but the internet should not be considered the only future answer--not everyone has access and it's not reliable at this point.

What's more, I don't know if papers are REALLY in trouble or if the big corporations that own them aren't making the BIG profits they  want to make. No one is satisfied with marginal to moderate gains anymore, it's "go big or go home."  Gannett was squeezing  the Free Press staff a long before the recession dropped the bottom out of advertising dollars, just to keep increasing those quarterly profits.

I think Emerson Lynn is doing fine, the SAM seems stable, I haven't noticed any major production changes over the past year (gotten smaller, less news, fewer adds), I don't know if anyone else has. It has a fair number of employees for a small paper and a printing business. There are a number of weekly sister papers in various towns that are free and doing well I assume, because they're still published (Milton Independent, Essex Reporter, Colchester Sun).

Anyway, I got way off track---papers shouldn't charge for obits. There is enough to worry about for the family!

 

[DrewCrash]

Universal healthcare, if passed by Congress, will eliminate death. The arguments are all moot. Death is knocking on death's door.