Hi! I'm at Poynter's Women's Leadership Academy this week, and I thought a recent edition of my obits newsletter 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.
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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