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Understanding the answers will help us learn if feature obituaries can drive readership and build revenue through subscriptions
Once in a while, notice of someone’s death takes on a life all its own — the addict who was also a mother with a beautiful voice, the hard-living, sweet-souled uncle, the former beauty queen grandma who wrote her own obituary.
Three months into my Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship experimenting with obituaries, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an obit also a good read. What makes people share them? What do they have in common?
Understanding the answers will help us learn if feature obituaries can drive readership and build revenue through subscriptions. And after my first piece on the project, I heard from a woman who had some special insights.
Bonnie Upright is a former journalist and the daughter of a woman whose obit went viral. Upright has become an expert on great obits not only because the obituary her mom wrote in 2015 went viral but also because it was the most-read piece in her former newsroom, The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, that year, and it gets plagiarized now and then.
It’s that good.
Emily DeBrayda Phillips came home from the doctor’s appointment where she learned she had pancreatic cancer and wrote her obituary.
Here it is, republished with Upright’s permission:
It pains me to admit it, but apparently, I have passed away. Everyone told me it would happen one day but that’s simply not something I wanted to hear, much less
Read more here: https://www.poynter.org/locally/2020/lessons-from-a-viral-obituary/