Entries associated with the tag "Obituaries":

The one unquestionably positive thing I have to say about the Trib redesign--and I might be alone in not being wholly skeptical*--is that they're not neglecting obits (can't link directly to it, but in the tour look under Front Section, Legacies).

As someone who's mostly trained in features/literary journalism (including an immensely valuable and fun internship at the soon-to-fold Tempo section), I have an innate fear of "newsworthiness," and the fact that dying + being kind of interesting as a person is still considered newsworthy means that obits might be our last best hope for the form (until the economy gets better I'll have to scrap my plans for Obit Monthly). Anyway, support your local obits section, sometimes you find amazing things.

*Incidentally, re pictures: Some people will tell you that big pictures, because of eye-tracking charts, are useless. In other words, eyes don't stay on pictures very long. But that's crazy--of course they don't, the density of information is much lower. That doesn't mean they can't be used well. Just because a John Leax poem takes me a thousandth of the time to read as a book doesn't mean it's 1,000 times less good. More photo-oriented journalism, I think, would have made Americans more skeptical of the Iraq War, just as the unprecedentedly visual coverage of the Vietnam War undermined the official line.

I could get deep into the history and ethics of that, but kinda busy r/n. There's plenty of good literature on it.

And also: sometimes you just want to look at pictures, so I wanted to share my and my fiancee's gripe that the Trib's comprehensive Emmy red carpet photo gallery could stand to have wider pictures, kthxbye.

Actually, I will be stunned if this is not the obit of the year. Swedish immigrant Pehr Bolling, who passed away Monday at the age of 88, lived well:

• jumped into the Chicago River (in March of 1939) to save a suicidal man, "slugged" him after he fought, and dragged him back to shore
• was a mapmaker in World War II
• turned an old lifeboat into a one-ton Viking ship as something to do in retirement.

Trevor Jensen has done some outstanding work on what can be a thankless beat, and it is a shame that I had to click through to News Obituaries (it's on the homepage, the second-to-last item under News on the nav bar) to find it when Mary Schmich's data-scrape got front-and-center placement yesterday. If, in the future, our histories will be written primarily from our social networking profiles, that is a future I do not want a part of.

My only complaint is that video for the launch of the Viking ship exists, yet neither it nor even a picture is on their Web site.