One of my least favorite assignments I had in my time as a writer/editor mostly focused on entertainment news was the writing of obituaries or other tribute features for recently passed celebrities. It felt odd to turn these people’s lives, careers, and struggles into a couple hundred keyword-laden paragraphs, or a slideshow that’s vying for the top rank in search results as people learn the terrible news, wringing out as many ad-views from people as possible as they click through photos.
News organizations now usually bank pre-written obituaries of notable figures ready to update with key info, racing to “get ahead of death” as Joe Strupp put it in this Editor & Publisher piece on the phenomenon back in 2006. It never left the back of my mind that I was kind of running a losing race when I saw my editor had requested an obituary, a starving vulture picking at clickbait scraps. But still, I frantically researched actors, comics, musicians, and tried to cobble something publishable together.
I cringe at how formulaic some of these old pieces now read, especially from when I was just starting out in a small newsroom packed with unpaid interns and underpaid permalancers like me demanding far too many articles a day. You quote a family or spokesperson’s statement up top, go to cover early life, notable projects, touch on controversies, embed a tweet if some other celebrity said a nice tribute, mention next of kin, and move on after an edit pass. Obituaries can be moving and enlightening, whether they’re for a major world figure or just a friend of a friend whose tribute pops on your feed, but that sort of work wasn’t really possible in an environment where I just needed to write as quickly as possible.
I started thinking about this time again after the legendary singer Dolly Parton’s passing, which obviously devastated so many people who she inspired through her music, or directly helped through her lifelong commitment to philanthropy. I appreciated learning more about Parton’s legacy in thoughtful tributes and stories of her pervasive kindness, but this news cycle still got me thinking of how we tend to treat these public figures as commodities long before their deaths.
Now that we’re in the era of AI slop generators popping up every way you turn, we’ve seen plenty of celebrity family members speak out against it. They now include Dolly Parton’s sister Stella, who publicly denounced the “AI and endless garbage,” being churned out as a twisted tribute to her, by misguided-at-best “fans” and of course the fucking President as well. It’s such an insult to resort to AI generation when these celebrities typically have no shortage of photos, videos, and interviews for you to reflect on after years in the public eye.
This stuff absolutely turns my stomach, but when I feel particularly self-critical, I can see the line linking my hopelessly rushed obituaries and this AI celebrity necromancy. As time went on and I kept writing for other publications, I believe that I improved at incorporating more thoughtful writing within the time and formal constraints I had, but I still have complicated feelings about the exercise that stayed with me after I turned a draft in.
I can never write an obituary as well as someone who actually knew the person. It will always be a fractured regurgitation of other impressions, random press or editorial shots covered in the Getty Images subscription, and past clipped statements, and then even further warped by my curation of the beats of their lives within the word count. But especially back in the start, I wish I felt more empowered to reach out and do some real reporting even if my website didn’t have any name recognition.
I was very much learning how to be a journalist on the job, I tripped into the role after fleeing from film/tv set work when Covid-19 first began. At the start, I did little more than aggregation of better newsroom’s reporting outside of the occasional film review I got to take complete ownership of. There are hundreds of rough stories under my name out in the world, some of which I linked in this piece, but they can at least now represent the type of work I don’t want to do anymore.
When writing this piece, I came across an obituary for Ludwig van Beethoven from Gentlemen’s Magazine. The obituary pretty effectively framed Beethoven’s musical genius alongside his personal struggles, and political unrest at the time, including one part flat out saying, “Beethoven’s manners appear to have been rather repulsive than conciliating; his friends were few, and he was in open enmity with many.” The closing paragraph was particularly scathing, touching on his illness and deafness late in life and then finishing with, “In their neglect of living genius the feelings of the Germans appear to assimilate too closely with those of their brethren the English; for, although Beethoven was allowed to languish and expire in poverty, his remains were honoured with a splendid and ostentatious funeral.”
Not all good obits need to blast whichever nation neglected its great geniuses, but it felt refreshing to see that someone plainly critiqued this posthumous exploitation of a public figure in print almost 200 years ago. I feel I had a small part in that dehumanizing apparatus that honors peoples’ remains without giving them what they need to truly flourish in life, which is probably harsh given I was just writing news blasts on a tiny celebrity website. But I can’t help but be harsh sometimes, because I approach any type of writing work attached to my name with as much care as I can summon, even in suboptimal conditions. It’s one of the only damn things I’m good at, after all.
I opted into penning way more obituaries than most people will hopefully ever have to, and in my rush to keep moving through pieces, I didn’t respect the process of writing them nearly enough. These pieces I wrote were far from definitive accounts on these peoples’ lives, but I also probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the equally morbid alternative technique of preparing obituaries for old celebrities, even if they could have been more informative. I could lament the lack of mentorship, but I still taught myself a lot, and gained enough confidence to look back on old pieces like these obituaries and see their flaws, but also be grateful that I had a small platform to learn this type of writing that I still love doing in some odd form today.
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