Steve Outing must have been reading my mind today when he wrote this entry: Obits for the Next Generation
I wrote a lovely obituary (if I do say so myself!) and sent it to my mom yesterday for publication. Unfortunately it would have cost $1100 to publish it for one day.
Yes, you read that right: Eleven HUNDRED dollars. For one day’s publication in a local newspaper. We’re not talking New York Times here.
I admit to being a spoiled geeky girl, but this makes no sense to me. I also don’t want to hear the newspapers whine about losing print readers to electronic media. What the hell do they expect with rates like that?
I argued a bit with Mom, saying that to me, the value of an archived obit is in the future — that 100 years from now, no matter how hard we try to preserve family history, we may not be able to but newspaper archives live on.
However, I’m thinking that there must be an electronic equivalent — a “net vault” so to speak that could store obits and the like on a redundant network so that they’d be accessible far after I and my generation are gone.
My mom asked me to cut the obit to the bare minimum and save the rest for saying at the memorial service. That’s inadequate. I’m more than willing to edit (and I did, sneaking in at least a few adjectives), but I’m not willing to let the rest evaporate into spoken words at a memorial service that no one will remember enough to pass down a couple of extra generations.
So for now, I’ll post it here. When I find a place that I can pay to archive and keep it so that 150 years from now our descendants don’t tear their hair out like I did to find more than just bare facts, I’ll pony up the money for it.
Newspapers need to come round to 21st century thinking. It’s time for them to LEAD, not gouge.
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