The New York Times recently solicited questions for their Obituaries editor, Bill McDonald. I submitted a question, and it appeared in the online edition. Check it out:
When the Writer’s Obit Precedes That of the Subject
Q. I recently read the obituary for James Van Allen, who died in August at age 91. I was dismayed to see the byline at the end that mentioned that the person who wrote the obituary had himself died in 1996. I understand the need to write obituaries in advance, but was there really no need to update Van Allen's tribute for over 10 years?
-- Betsy Burton
A. It's a sensible question. As it happened, we actually did update the obit with the details of Dr. Van Allen's death; they were added by an editor, in the paragraphs that preceded the byline. At least, that’s the way it was presented in the printed pages of the newspaper (see an Adobe Acrobat PDF file of that day’s page). Everything under the byline was written in the mid-1990's by Walter Sullivan, who was a prominent and well-respected science editor and writer at The Times. The Web version didn’t make the distinction clearly, and we’ll have to work on better ways to do that.
But more to your point: This was an exceedingly rare case of our using the byline of an obit writer who was himself deceased. As I mentioned earlier in response to another question, we maintain a large bank of obituaries written in advance, some of which outlive their authors, as this one did. In most cases we do not use an obituary whose author is deceased; we have it rewritten. But in some instances the author was so prominent or such an authority in his field that we feel the original obit is worth preserving. Walter Sullivan was such a journalist. Having covered the space age from its earliest days, he brought to the obit a depth of knowledge, experience and perspective that we felt was too valuable to discard.
When Bob Hope died, the obituary we had on hand had been written by Vincent Canby, who by then was also dead. But we chose to publish the obit, using a similar presentation, because Canby was one of the nation's most thoughtful and respected film and theater critics. In each case we chose to stick with the original obit not to honor one of our own but because we thought our readers would truly benefit from his words, even if we had to resurrect them.
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