If you want to find the best writing in any newspaper, skip the front page and go straight to the obituaries.

Sounds morbid, but it’s true. While the rest of the paper is full of partisan framing, both-sides-ism, and careful dancing around controversy, the obituary page is where journalists actually tell you what happened and what someone meant. No hedging, no “some say” qualifiers, just straight reporting with enough humanity to remind you why journalism matters.

The Constraints Create Excellence

Obituaries operate under unusual constraints. You can’t exactly call the deceased for comment or a fact-check. You need to summarize an entire life in 800 words or less. You have to be fair to a person who can’t defend themselves while also being honest to readers who deserve the truth.

Those constraints force clarity. There’s no room for padding or speculation. You tell the story of a life as accurately and compellingly as you can, and you do it fast because the deadline’s measured in days, not weeks.

The result? Some of the tightest, most efficient storytelling in journalism.

The Permission to Be Honest

Here’s the weird paradox: obituaries for notable figures are often more honest than the profiles written about them while they were alive.

When someone dies, the urgency to maintain access disappears. You don’t need to worry about burning bridges or getting frozen out of future interviews. You can acknowledge both the achievements and the failures, the public persona and the private flaws.

That doesn’t mean obituaries are hatchet jobs—good obits are fair and contextual. But they don’t have to pretend difficult people were easy or that complex legacies were simple. The need to maintain relationships no longer constrains the reporting.

I’ve seen publications work with a group we’ve worked with to develop systems for tracking notable figures and pre-writing obituaries so they’re ready to update when needed. It’s morbid, sure, but it also ensures that when someone dies, the newspaper can publish something thoughtful rather than rushed.

The Democracy of Death

Death is the great equalizer, and obituary pages reflect that in ways the rest of the paper doesn’t.

Sure, famous people get longer obits. But most obituary pages also include shorter notices for ordinary folks—teachers, shopkeepers, volunteers, parents. People who never made headlines but mattered to their communities.

This creates accidental social history. Decades from now, researchers will mine obituary archives to understand what kinds of lives were considered notable in 2025, what values got emphasized, how different communities honored their dead.

The rest of the newspaper obsesses over the powerful. The obituary page reminds us that most lives are quiet, local, and still worth documenting.

The Writing Permission Slip

Obituary writers get permission to do things that would get cut from news stories. They can be poetic. They can include small, telling details. They can let the narrative breathe.

The best obituaries read like short stories—character studies that reveal something essential about a person through carefully chosen anecdotes and observations. They have narrative arcs, thematic coherence, even occasional humor when appropriate.

This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. The obituary genre explicitly allows for writing that’s more literary than journalistic in the traditional sense. That freedom produces memorable work.

The Aggregation Problem

Of course, not all obituaries are created equal. Many newspapers have gutted their obituary desks along with everything else. What you get increasingly are syndicated obits from wire services or barely edited submissions from funeral homes.

Those aren’t journalism—they’re public service announcements. Useful, sure, but not the same as a well-reported, well-written obituary that captures who someone was and why they mattered.

The papers that still invest in serious obituary writing are doing something important. They’re creating a record of their communities that will outlast next week’s political scandal or last month’s weather event.

The Emotional Labor

Writing obituaries is emotionally exhausting work. You’re often dealing with grieving families while trying to extract accurate information and honest assessments. You’re processing death constantly, usually multiple deaths per day.

Good obituary writers develop coping mechanisms, but the toll is real. It’s journalism that requires not just writing skills but genuine empathy and emotional intelligence.

And unlike covering city hall or sports, you can’t develop cynical detachment. Each obituary is about a specific person whose absence matters to specific other people. That weight never fully goes away.

The Historical Record

Obituaries create a permanent record in ways that most journalism doesn’t. Breaking news gets updated and corrected until it’s unrecognizable. Features become dated. Editorials age poorly.

But obituaries remain fixed. Once someone’s dead, the facts of their life don’t change. What you write about them becomes the definitive account, at least for general audiences.

That permanence raises the stakes. Get it wrong, and you’ve potentially misrepresented someone for posterity. But get it right, and you’ve created something that will help future generations understand the past.

The Genre Conventions

Obituaries have developed conventions that actually serve their purpose. The opening usually includes full name, age, location, and brief summary of significance. Then a chronological or thematic exploration of the life. Then survivors and service information.

Those conventions aren’t arbitrary—they evolved because they work. They give readers a quick sense of who died before diving into details. They provide a structure that helps writers organize complex life stories.

But the best obit writers know when to break convention. Sometimes the story demands a different approach, and the genre’s flexible enough to allow it.

The Celebrity Versus Regular Divide

There’s a weird gap between celebrity obituaries and everyone else’s. Famous people get exhaustive, pre-written treatments that get published within hours. Regular folks often get minimal coverage days or weeks later.

That gap reflects broader inequalities in who gets remembered and how. But it also creates opportunities. Some of the most moving obituaries are about people nobody famous—individuals whose lives were remarkable in ways that don’t make headlines but absolutely deserve documentation.

The Future of the Form

Obituaries are one of the few journalism genres that hasn’t been completely disrupted by digital media. People still read them, still value them, still save and share them.

But the business model’s shaky. Obituary desks are expensive to maintain, and the revenue they generate (mostly from paid death notices) is declining as people move to online memorial sites.

Some papers are experimenting with digital-first obituaries that include multimedia elements—videos, photo galleries, comment sections where readers can share memories. Whether that’s an improvement or a distraction depends on execution.

Why It Matters

In an era of fake news, partisan framing, and algorithmic feeds, obituaries remain stubbornly resistant to corruption. They’re fact-based, human-centered, and written with care.

That makes them not just good writing but important journalism. They remind us what journalism can be when it’s not trying to generate clicks or confirm biases—just trying to tell true stories about real people.

Every newspaper should have someone who can write obituaries well. It’s one of the few guarantees that good journalism will still be happening even as everything else falls apart.

And when you die, wouldn’t you want someone to get your story right?