The news on standby: Why do reporters write obituaries of people who are still alive?

Richard Lacayo of Time magazine was working the afternoon Ronald Reagan died. It was close to quitting time when he got the news, so Lacayo was understandably relieved that he already had Reagan’s obituary ready for publication.

By the time of Reagan’s death, Lacayo said, “it was only necessary to trim the piece for space.”

The average newspaper or news magazine reader is probably not aware that obituaries of prominent people are generally written years before they die. No doubt The Washington Post and The New York Times have on file obits for President George Bush; his wife, Laura; his father, George H.W. Bush; his mother, Barbara Bush; and his brother, Jeb Bush.

Should one of these people die (and even those of us who don’t vote for Bushes don’t wish that), a news organization would need a package of stories ready to go on very short notice.

Now you know how your Time or Newsweek showed up in your mailbox on Monday (June 7) or Tuesday (June 8), when Reagan had been dead less than two days, with around 30 pages devoted to the former president’s life and career.

I conducted an informal, unscientific survey of coverage of Reagan’s death, contacting reporters or editors at The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek.

Like Richard Lacayo’s organization, the Post, the Times, and Newsweek were ready.

Lacayo told me he drafted his story about the former president five years ago, leading with a discussion of how President Bill Clinton was affected by the Reagan legacy. Lacayo’s co-author John F. Dickerson updated the story in the last few months, including a rewrite of the lead. According to Lacayo and Dickerson, Dickerson interviewed “nearly all of the people quoted in the finished story.”

The New York Times’s Daily Obituary Editor, C. Claiborne Ray, said she came to her present job about five years ago, and Reagan’s obituary was already largely written. She said it was “updated over a period of some years,” and reminded me that such updating is routine.

Ray said she’d heard “a great story” that, during the last few years of Winston Churchill’s life, “there was a guy at The New York Times who pretty much devoted himself to updating Churchill’s obituary.”

Ombudsman Michael Getler of the Post said the newspaper had had an obit for Reagan on file “for quite some time.”

I didn’t get a reply from Newsweek yet, but it seems to me that only the first five paragraphs and the last one of Jon Meacham’s lengthy article had to have been written after Reagan’s death.

So a story that, from the outside, might seem like a scramble was actually easier to cover than many breaking news stories. Reporters and editors had the significant advantage of knowing, for more than 10 years, that the former president was terminally ill. For months now, he had apparently been in a gradual decline.

By contrast, consider the sudden death of President John Kennedy. I’m sure major news organizations had obituaries for Kennedy on file well before Nov. 22, 1963. Kennedy’s health problems were so serious that he was read last rites three or four times prior to his death, so nobody considered his mortality risk low.

But the circumstances of Kennedy’s death called for considerable fresh coverage, and I’m sure major news organizations were far busier covering Kennedy’s death than they were the weekend of Reagan’s.

One of my favorite units in my news writing class is teaching students to write a file obituary. They aren’t especially good at it at first, because they choose celebrities they like, and they often write tributes instead of obituaries. They have to be taught to look with a dispassionate eye at the life of a public figure.

As a callisthenic for writing the death story of a famous person, I ask students to write each other’s obituaries. (I used to have them write their own, but they found that too morbid.) I believe this exercise helps them understand the need for accuracy and sensitivity in what, for the average person, may be his or her only appearance in the pages of a newspaper.

Writing obituaries is an important aspect of journalism. Mistakes in these stories are hurtful. A friend’s mother died in April, and the omission of her maiden name from her obituary was disappointing to my friend, her son. When the deceased is a famous person, such mistakes are published on a much larger scale, and those stories, unlike local obituaries, usually run with bylines. So if something is wrong, we know exactly who got it wrong.

To avoid such mistakes, news organizations prepare well in advance for the deaths of prominent people.

The real surprise would have been if the newspapers and magazines I surveyed had not been prepared for Ronald Reagan’s death.