Earlier this year we featured a video post about a new obituary company, The Memorial Post, that has it’s sights set on taking down Legacy.com. This is a pretty hefty goal but one that they think is possible. Now, an internet blogger is suggesting that when The Memorial Post launches later this summer they could be the Craigslist for obituaries.
Blog post below is from: Guy Lucas, Newsroom With A View
For the past four years, I have wondered why there has been no equivalent of Craigslist for obituaries. The question was sparked by a post by Steve Buttry in 2010, but it wasn’t until my mother’s death in May 2012 that I learned myself how truly awful – and expensive – the newspaper-based obituary system is. Submitting obituaries is, in many cases, cumbersome and emotionally taxing, exactly the opposite of what people who are placing obituaries need, and the cost of a single obituary in larger newspapers is equivalent to what I spend on my credit card in an entire month.
The difficulty and cost of placing obituaries is pretty much equivalent of some of the reasons people migrated away from newspaper classified ads years ago to free or cheap online listings (and why journalists themselves shifted their own job ads from the expensive Editor & Publisher, which used to be the go-to place to look for a job, to the relatively cheap journalismjobs.com).
Why, I have wondered, had that not happened with obituaries?
Part of it, I am sure, is that having a print obituary still has some emotional value to people. They can hold it, put it in a scrap book, frame it. It’s a tangible link to someone who is no longer there.
Perhaps a bigger part is that people grew up with newspapers being considered the place to announce births, engagements, marriages and deaths. There are people in the city where I live now who have told me that if it weren’t for their desire to see who died, they wouldn’t buy the paper anymore, and I doubt that I am the only editor who has been told such a thing.
Despite all that, I wondered why there was not a cheap online alternative to obituaries.
And then last week, the people behind The Memorial Post sent me a link to a video explaining their cheap online alternative to obituaries.
