Delaware County Daily Times - Sept 6, 1999 Article

I had a visitor in the office this week. Nothing unusual about that. A reporter popped her head in and said there was a very upset man in the newsroom. If you've been in many newsrooms, you'd know there's nothing especially unusual about that either. People get upset about things we put in the paper every day. It goes with the territory.

Delaware County Daily Times (Primos - Upper Darby, PA) - Monday, September 6, 1999

""He's upset about an obit,'' the reporter said. Now that's a little unusual. We deal with funeral directors and families every day over corrections or changes in obits. Very few of them take the time to visit the office. I showed the man into my office.

The reporter wasn't kidding. The guy was steamed. ""How are you doing?'' I asked. Wrong question. ""Not very good,'' he snapped back. "I'm mad about this obituary. What ran in the paper is not what we submitted. I talked to the funeral home and they said you changed it. You shouldn't charge people and then change the information.''

He was right. And wrong. More importantly, he proved a pet peeve of mine: Very few things have a deeper personal connection with our readers than the obits.

But this time I was dealing with it face to face. Two days before, this man's wife had died. Now he was in my office complaining about her obit. As I've told staffers more times than I can count, the obituary is the last mention of a person's life and accomplishments. It is the last thing, along with the lottery numbers, that you want to screw up. You leave a bitter taste in people's mouths and make an enemy out of people who may have been loyal readers.

And that's precisely what this gentleman said we had done. Or, as he put it: "This isn't my paper. I read the Inquirer. This was her paper. She read it every day. And you didn't get it right. You changed what we submitted.''

He was right. I checked the information that appeared in the Inquirer. That's when I realized what had happened. The funeral home had placed a death notice, a paid advertisement, in the Inquirer. In the ad the funeral home can word what is to appear any way they want. They are billed by the line. But the funeral home did not place a death notice with us. They faxed us material for an obituary, which is a news story and for which we use different guidelines.

In obituaries we do not list the names of sons- or daughters-in-law. We also do not use names of nieces, nephews or grandchildren, only the numbers. We included all the personal information detailing her education and employment, and even how she enjoyed playing cards and her organ. The husband wasn't satisfied. The obit wasn't what he wanted. Period. He was being billed for something and he didn't like the idea of it being changed. That brings up another matter. When a funeral director takes a paid death notice, the obituary is free. When no death notice is taken, there is a $55 fee for the obit. That fee is likely to be passed along to the customer, as it was in this case.

As I tried to explain our guidelines to the irate gentleman in my office, it reminded me once again how important obits are to the paper and how personal a connection they make with family and friends. That is why I recently liberalized our rules concerning some personal information we put into the obits. We want to make people happy and make the last reference to a loved one in the Daily Times a positive one. In this case, although I stand by our guidelines, we did just the opposite. And for that I am sorry.

MORE GRUMBLING: He wasn't the only one upset with us this past week. Earlier we learned of a fund-raiser for Katelyn Rivera -Helton, the toddler kidnapped and still missing in Chi. We publicized the event. And we asked the family if they would object if we staffed it. If they had said yes, we wouldn't have gone. They said they had no objection. Reporter Rose Quinn went and talked to family members there, who were most cooperative, and apparently appreciative of our coverage.

But several people at the event questioned why we were there and ridiculed us for not respecting the family's pain and privacy. There may be instances where those kinds of accusations can be leveled against the media. This wasn't one of them.