It’s a joke inside the newspaper industry, but it’s true. The main reason many tired old people take tired old newspapers is the obituary page. They need to know if their friends are dead, and if they didn’t need to know that, they might not feel like they have to take the paper. It’s useful information you can’t get anywhere else. Yet.

That’s a shame, because obits are some great information, and they are one way that the newspaper can both emphasize its usefulness in print as well as deliver long term search engine benefits to a newspaper’s website.

But obits, as practiced by most daily American newspapers, are seen mostly as a revenue opportunity, a way to get some bucks in collaboration from the guy at the funeral home who places the ads. And newspapers do the most counter-productive thing with the content of the obituaries after they are printed, namely brokering the information to a third party.

So, while I admire the ideal of the newspaper obituary (seen here in an image from online Obit Magazine, as practiced, they are now evidence of why the daily newspaper monopoly has deservedly crumbled.

I worked at a small afternoon daily in Petersburg, Virginia called The Progress-Index, once part of Thomson (which drained it dry and pumped cash out) and now Times-Shamrock. It is a quite amazing feat that the newspaper is still around. But that’s a separate story. Every day, someone typed up the obits as they were faxed in by the funeral homes. As editors, we had to read them and proof them. But we charged for them, over a certain number of free words, a deal that was worked with the cooperation of the funeral home. I wish I could recall if the newspaper charged for the words at the end, that included very long mention of the funeral home. Sometimes you even had a LOGO of the funeral home inserted inside the text. Now that’s branding!

If you wanted a few short words, that was free, justified by the idea that the newspaper had “paper of record” status.

Now, us fussy self-righteous journalists of a post-Watergate vintage stick their noses in the air over mixing editorial and subsidized content. Like Jane Pauley did so long ago with the Today Show where she refused to read ads, we will have nothing to do with THAT! But when it came to obits, all bets were off. The practice with our paper was that the editors had to edit the paid obituaries, something that “pure” journalists were not supposed to do. But we did it anyway.

Furthermore, there was a class distinction. We would give something free away to rich and influential people (namely the “news obit”) and then charge poor and less influential people a few bucks for a “paid obit.” Furthermore, we would run the obit in ugly looking type that was less nice than the real newspaper.

The only way newspapers got to this cheapskate journalism was over money. In the old days, newspapers would just publish information from readers. Weddings, parties, visitors, and yes even obits, were written by the family and submitted to the newspaper, which edited and verified them. They saw it as a service, of being a part of the community. The funeral home merely confirmed the deaths, so there were no fakes.

The American practice of obits was different than the practice in the U.K. In London newspaper, the newspaper obit is taken seriously. Writers are honest about the faults of the deceased. The people featured in obits were interesting, as well. Not just for the rich and powerful, but anyone interesting might have a chance at a news obit.

I go into this long explanation because at the death of the father of a close friend, a quite newsworthy one, the newspaper online obituary linked to a third party side, Legacy.com, where one could leave comments about the person, as well as read the obituary for a certain amount of time. It came at the same time I got a request to write about an online obituary service, Tributes.com launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor in February of 2008. That site aims to link up with other media partners that include radio stations, and combat the monopolized obituary industry, citing a recent study by Northwestern University that talks of the pressures on newspaper obits.

“The Internet is transforming the way people grieve,” said Taylor in a press release, “and the Obituary classifieds was the last laggard classified section that hadn’t made a meaningful transition from print to online.”

There are significant revenues though figuring out what they are takes some work if you aren’t in it each day. Newspapers don’t like to publicize how much they make on dead people, and few newspapers publish the rates online as it is such an insider club. Andrew Alexander, writing in the Washington Post’s (NYSE: WPO) blog, puts their revenues at millions, and said that their section gets three times the traffic as them metro section. Some obits can run as much as $500. Most newspapers (how nice!) only offer the paid obits as pre-paid. Granted, running an obituary desk is a staff cost for newspapers (a great explanation of the reason is online at the West Central Tribune of Willmar, Minnesota). There is nothing morally wrong with charging for obits, especially if families want to put in all sorts of junk about their beloved that has no interest to readers except for entertainment value.

But that makes this a plum opportunity for competitors.

My question is what are newspapers going to do about it? Thoughts:

1. Careful with third parties. Why share revenue with a third party? Newspapers need to own the information themselves. When a person dies, they become a part of a historical record, and people from generations on will be interested in the lives of the deceased as long as there is geneology, which has Old Testament roots, so it will be around. So why should a newspaper share those long-term keyword and search engine benefits with an outside site, when THEY are the ones that are doing the hard work of processing the obits? Certainly, they need revenue but building your local brand, franchise and web traffic must come first. And some newspapers might need third-party partners to help with online, but keep it at a distance, just in case.
2. Why do they charge to keep a newspaper “up” on the site after only a year? Some newspapers leave these notices up permanently. Many do not. The few dollars made on charging for this might be nice, but long term, this information keeps the newspapers website as the central hub of community information.
3. Keep the funeral homes at arm’s length. Deciding on how and if you have paid obits is one thing, but remember that being to close with the funeral home is not good for your brand. Funeral homes are customers of newspapers, not partners.
4. Why not allow comments on obits for a longer time than just after the death? This is a way for local papers to build readership, especially with partners like Facebook.
5. This discussion applies to weddings and engagements, too. It was only a decade or so ago that newspapers published these free, with the simple but elegant idea that when readers read the notices, they would look at the ads for bridal shops, jewelers and department stores. Then they started getting cheap, started charging, and the ads dried up. This happened at the Times-Dispatch and Virginian-Pilot, and it ruined the Sunday lifestyle section revenue.
6. Newspapers need to understand that obits, even of the lowly, have an information value. Doing research for a consumer products company’s marketing department, I found clues to the early history of the product from an obit.
7. This will be more critical in an age of tablet newspapers, if that comes. Local parties will want a simple way to see their local obits, with a local spin, and the newspaper is the best source.
8. Matrix of web links are aided by obits. For newspaper sites to be powerful, they need to build up a network of linked pages. Imagine the SEO benefits of having all your newspaper obits published as separate pages on the Internet? All of a sudden a small community paper begins to truly dominate the information.
9. The outside revenue threat is great. Craigslist is a very imperfect product, yet with only a few employees has stolen billions in revenue away from newspapers. This can also happen with obituaries. Yet newspapers can compete with Craigslist by offering better, more tailored ads, and a larger audience.
10. Connect with churches, libraries and historical societies. Funeral homes aren’t the only ones that deal with the deceased. Opening up connections with local churches allows for all sorts of revenue. What if newspapers published eulogies and services in podcast form? There are many opportunities, not only with advertising revenue but from ancillary services.
11. Legacy newspapers need to consider how their microfiche archives (and photos of the deceased) can be tagged, displayed and turned into text. Don’t just leave it up to Google; figure out a way to digitize.
12. Don’t discount the value of the printed edition. The printed obit means something to families, and no one wants to keep a fading home laserprint of a loved one when they can have the actual printed clipping, perhaps encased in lucite.
13. What happened to births? Newspapers used to routinely publish births, and local newspapers still do. They need to appear in local papers again, or at least online.
14. This isn’t easy. It’s not as simple as just posting all your obits online. It needs a few weeks of thinking how your community dies, what rituals there are, and crafting a solution that builds your newspaper brand and franchise. How much gets printed, and how much goes online? Photography, keywords, tags, typography and style issues with words are important, and must be crafted locally.

Garland Pollard is a freelance web editor/consultant and business writer in Sarasota, Florida.