Feature photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash
By Kathleen Burns
WHAT: Webinar
WHEN: March 21, starting at 7 p.m. EDT
HOW: Register here
Getting an obituary of a loved one into the newspaper can take on the aura of a sports competition, in that there is no fee for running obits in the news section, or sometimes on the front page. But there is a cost for the Death Notices. The obits are written by reporters and the Death Notices are not.
With an estimated 1.1 million people who have died in the United States since the COVID pandemic was declared in 2020, there is no shortage of subjects to write about who have died from that disease, as well as many other causes.
How do the obit editors decide who gets this coveted space in a newspaper? What are the criteria in deciding who gets this coverage when news value, history and human interest converge in creating the art of the obituary? And what is the process whereby future obits for famous people like politicians, sports figures and well-known individuals are written and archived long before they die — with the reporter often facing a tight deadline for creating such stories?
Join us to find out, when two veteran journalists — Matt Schudel and Harrison Smith — will talk about the challenges of writing lively stories about the dead in the obituary pages of The Washington Post. The free webinar program on Zoom starts at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 21. The hour-and-a-half program is hosted by the SPJ Washington, D.C., Professional Chapter and is open to SPJ members and the public.
Moderator for the panel is Kathleen Burns, a long-time SPJ DC member, who also organized the program.
Panelists
Matt Schudel has been a professional journalist for more than 30 years and was an obituary writer at The Washington Post from 2004 to mid-2022. He was born in Nebraska and grew up on a hog and dairy farm. Schudel earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and the University of Virginia. Before joining the Post, he worked at newspapers and magazines in North Carolina, New York and Florida. He has won more than 30 regional and national awards for his writing. Schudel is also the author of the critically acclaimed “Muhammad Ali: The Birth of a Legend, Miami 1961-1964.” He has written widely on books, jazz and the visual arts, and he lectures frequently on journalism and obituary writing. He is a member of the National Press Club.
Like his colleague Schudel, Harrison Smith has diverse journalistic experiences. He has been a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk since 2015. Smith has written about people who have made a significant impact on Washington, the country or the world, whether as big-game hunters, single-handed sailors, fallen dictators or Olympic medalists. In 2019, he was named by the Society of Professional Obituary Writers as the “Obit Writer of the Year.“ Before joining the Post, he wrote for city and regional magazines including D, Chicago and Washingtonian. He was born in Dallas and graduated from the University of Chicago, where he helped grow a student-run newspaper into the nonprofit South Side Weekly.
Schudel and Smith will talk about how no-fee obituaries are news stories and feature stories — and are quite different from eulogies given at funerals or the family-written accounts that appear in the paid Death Notices section of the newspaper.
Moderator
Kathleen Burns, a past president of the SPJ DC Pro Chapter, served her first term as DC Pro Chapter president in the early 1980s, and she was one of the first women to hold that position. She remained a chapter member and then ran for president again for another term in 2016. She serves as the chapter’s liaison to SPJ student chapters in the D.C. area colleges and universities, seeking to bring up the next generation of journalists equipped with SPJ ethics and professional development traditions. She was part of the Chicago Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of voter fraud. One of her beats was consumer affairs and she was recruited by the retail chain, Montgomery Ward, to serve as its national consumer affairs adviser. From there, she moved to Detroit to serve as bureau chief for Fairchild Publications, including its premier publication, Women’s Wear Daily. In Washington, D.C., she worked for a series of trade journals and as the business and economics reporter for UPI. She then spent five years overseas as a foreign correspondent in Canberra, Australia, and was the only U.S. reporter accredited to the Parliamentary Press Gallery. When she returned to the U.S., she was the inaugural program director for the Australian and New Zealand studies program at Georgetown University.