Tell Stories as Good as the Obits in The New York Times—But Nobody Needs to Die

Corporate communications people often think they don’t have anything in common with journalists, especially those morbid creatures, obituary writers.

Yet those who labor on behalf of companies may be pleasantly surprised by “Are They Dead Yet?” by Sam Roberts, an obituary writer for The New York Times. The book contains many useful tips for writing about new hires, promotions and retirements.

The bridge between Roberts’ world and the corporate realm is found in his insight that obituaries are about life, not about death.

They’re an “opportunity to put the person’s life in perspective,” he writes.

Job changes are opportunities to put employees’ work lives in perspective. Communicators should mark the occasion with a profile.

Obits often exemplify the elements of good profiles, my colleague Jim Ylisela has written. The classic elements of a profile are: opening anecdote, nut graph, themes, background and the look ahead. (Every profile doesn’t have to have all five elements.)

Reluctant obituarist
Roberts’ combines a history of newspaper obituaries, inner workings of the Times’, reflections on his career and insights into journalism.

He came to the newspaper’s Obit Desk after a long career that began in 1968 at the tabloid New York Daily News. At the Times, he was an urban affairs correspondent and the author of five (now seven) books when in 2014 the executive editor asked his help reducing a backlog of obituaries of celebrities to be prepared before their deaths, called advance obits.

Roberts wasn’t keen on becoming an obituarist, the formal name for such writers. Obits were considered a “professional death penalty,” he writes.

Yet he changed his tune.  As a result, we have five tips we’ve drawn from Roberts’ entertaining book that dovetail with some of our own thoughts on writing profiles.

1. The first sentence. “Writing obituaries is about distilling the high and low points of a subject’s life — into an article, yes, but also into a single opening paragraph that fairly summarizes their existence,” Roberts writes.

This syncs with a common formula for first sentences, called ledes in newsrooms.

“Identify the traditional elements of reporting: Who, what, when, where, why and how? Then make choices,” we’ve written.

2. Why do we care? Corporate communicators think what they’re writing is important and take for granted that their audiences will think the same. Roberts doesn’t’ make that mistake.

The lede should contain a “succinct but compelling phrase that tells readers why they should bother, what with all the competition for their time and attention, to read the rest of the obituary,” Roberts writes. “Who was this person? Why did he matter? What did she accomplish? How did they affect my life? Does his story make me emote in some way, does it inspire me, amuse me, make me teary, does it teach me something?”

In 2023, we reminded corporate comms teams, “To win readers’ attention, you must clearly explain why they should care about the news, even if it seems obvious to you.”

Unlike obits, profiles often begin with an anecdote. Here’s how Roberts created one for someone that few readers would recognize:

It was drizzling in Central Park on Aug. 30, which was not unusual, since it had rained one out of three days that month. The temperature that day ranged between 60 and 78, which was nowhere near the historic low and high of 50 and 98.

That the weather in New York City was unexceptional that Wednesday would not, however, have deterred Stephen Fybish from finding something fascinating to say about it.

An amateur climatologist, he had carved out a unique niche in meteorological circles as an ardent hoarder and breathless disseminator of weather data. He might well have found, for example, in the next day or two, that August had turned out to be about one degree cooler and an inch or so of precipitation drier than the average August in New York.

But such observations were not to be: Aug. 30 was the day Mr. Fybish died. He was 80.

3. Get a good quote. High up in an obituary, perhaps the second or third paragraph, “is often a revelatory quote from the subject or one from some expert … justifying why the obituary is worth reading, why the world — or even a tiny slice of it — is in some way better or different because of them,” Roberts writes.

In corporate communications, the quotes are often canned. Chief executives are “thrilled” or “excited,” while employees are “honored” or “delighted.”

Getting good quotes isn’t easy, but there are proven ways to draw them out of people.

Examples of good quotes are abundant in Roberts’ chapter, “Famous Last Words,” in which, ironically, he questions their authenticity.

For example, when a dying Bob Hope was asked where he wanted to be buried, did the comedian actually say, “Surprise me”?

Roberts also doubts that George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” But he’d like to believe he did.

4. The overlooked. Corporate communicators should pay more attention to the employees who make an organization go: the insightful data analyst, welcoming security guard or encouraging mid-level manager.

Roberts reminds us of that by quoting obits of people such as Fybish, or a Silicon Valley consultant who mid-career switched to making mozzarella cheese, the inventor of the bar code, or the biologist who discovered that whales sing and in the 1970s played a key role in the movement to ban commercial whaling.

“What I’ve found most amazing after a decade on the dead beat is that almost every day so many of the obits I’m assigned are of transfixing and transformational people whom I had never heard of before,” Roberts writes.

Roberts has done plenty of obits of CEOS, celebrities and politicians, he offers a few examples of stories about people who were little known or unknown at the time of their death.

5. Eye for details.  Good writing isn’t dazzling phrases. It’s the product of solid reporting. If you want to be a better writer, become a better reporter. Develop an eye for telling details.

Roberts looks for a “brief anecdote that capsulizes the person’s career, or a sentence or two in his own words that captures what he has left behind.”

Or as Ann Roe, the obituaries editor at The Economist, says, “Chronologies may reveal curiously little about a man or a woman. On the other hand, the smallest things may offer vital clues. A brass letter-opener, a much-mended cardigan, a favorite word—a line of jars—may catch them much more sharply…. Find little details that show how they moved and talked. The things they carried, what set their rhythm.”

But you don’t know what you don’t know.

When the prolific lyricist Johnny Mercer (“Moon River” was his biggest hit) died in 1976, the Times ran a blurb on the front page about his death. The obit was “serviceable,” Roberts writes, but the writer didn’t know a key fact.

The writer William Saroyan, Mercer’s friend, wrote in 1979 that when Mercer’s father died broke, Mercer quietly paid off all his father’s debts.

“That would have fleshed out the lyricist’s persona beyond his obvious professional talent,” Roberts writes.

And likely causing the obit writer to say, “I wish I had known.”

Looking ahead
Profiles typically end with a look to the subject’s future, yet Roberts’ book is silent on the topic.

He writes: “One obvious gap in my reporting for advance obituaries is to ask people what comes next, assuming they believe that it’s heaven or some other version of paradise or reincarnation rather than oblivion.”

Tom Corfman, a senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group, is curious about many things, like Chicago journalist Studs Terkel. He wanted his tombstone to read, “Curiosity did not kill this cat.” Do you want to learn about our Build Better Writers program of workshops and one-on-one editing and coaching? Email Tom to set up a free call with him and RCG co-founder and senior partner Jim Ylisela.

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