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From the St. Petersburg Times, March 29, 2013. [Via Newspapers.com]
Hi! I'm at Poynter's Women's Leadership Academy ([link removed]) this week, and I thought a recent edition of my obits newsletter ([link removed]) for the Tampa Bay Times might be a good fit for Local Edition, too. It was originally published last week. Enjoy!
Lessons from a former obit writer
Andrew Meacham was 51 when he got his first job at the St. Petersburg Times. He worked as an editorial assistant. But he wanted to be a reporter.
Meacham got the chance, in 2007, writing one Epilogue a week for the Times to fill in for then-Epilogue reporter Stephanie Hayes. In 2009, he took over the job full time, and wrote five or six obits a week for the next six years.
He learned early from talking with some of the country’s best obituary reporters. One bit of advice that always worked — when someone gets choked up, and they always do, respond with: “Take your time.”
“Those three words helped me so much.”
Meacham believes that the objective of obituaries is simply to get to know someone.
“They don’t have to be accomplished, they don’t have to be whacky and eccentric,” he said. “They don’t have to be wonderful, they can have mysteries and gaps that leave you wondering.”
I asked him to share an obituary that stayed with him. He pointed to the story of Murial Towsley ([link removed]) .
Meacham moved into arts reporting in 2015, but writing obituaries was the best beat he had, he said.
It’s work that feels like summers from his childhood, where Meacham and his family traveled to Cocoa Beach while his father, a mathematician, worked for NASA. There, he’d dig into the wet sand and look at all the wiggling coquinas in his hand. No two were ever alike.
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While You’re Here:
* My colleague Rick Edmonds wrote about the growth of local newsletter startup 6AM City ([link removed]) .
* Read Dan Kennedy on The Boston Globe’s new monthly radio show, “Black News Hour.” ([link removed])
* Check out GBH’s new series, The Curiosity Desk ([link removed]) , and learn something new. (I did!)
* Read Laura Hazard Owen in Nieman Lab on the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Merida ([link removed]) . ([link removed])
* I’ll have more on this next week, but for now check out the AI Readiness Survey for local newsrooms ([link removed]) . ([link removed])
* Gannett and Google News Initiative have launched “Pass the Mic,” ([link removed]) “a database and messaging tool that connects reporters with sources from underrepresented communities including people of color, people who are LGBTQ+, women, people who are non-binary and people with disabilities.”
* And this week for the Tampa Bay Times, I wrote an obituary about a man ([link removed]) who was an airport executive, a Boy Scout leader, a pipe organist, a Wikipedia editor, a singer, a radio host, a model train builder, and he really liked wearing shorts.
That’s it for me! I made it until Sept. 27 before pulling out the pumpkins ([link removed]) , but the bats and spiders can’t come out until Friday. 🎃
Kristen
Kristen Hare
Editor, Locally
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])
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