The Blade & Polish Funeral Directors

Bob Driver writes a newspaper column down in Tampa, Florida. His July 11 column lamented that the St. Petersburg Times transfered control of obituaries to the advertising department from the news department like many dailies did in the past few years.

Here's his last paragraph of the column:

I worked three years for the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, a pretty good paper in its time. But like many newspapers (even the good ones) it had lousy management. One of its newsroom policies was that every reporter – even those who had 10 or 20 years experience – had to write obits. At any moment on any working day, a busy reporter might get the command: “Pick up on Line 1 – Dumbrowski’s got four obits.” (For some reason, most of Toledo’s funeral directors were Polish). Needless to say, the Blade had a high rate of turnover among its reporters. Management finally got smart and assigned all the routine obits to one person, a woman who doubled as a receptionist. I was told she did a superb job. I’m sure the Times has obit handlers just as good as she was.