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FAMILIES ARE FUMING?
Posted on January 28th, 2013 2 commentsAN UNCONSCIONABLE CHARGE!
And families are fuming, saying obituaries are riddled with errors — when they appear at all — flowers and other items aren’t ordered until the last moment, and their desperate calls to Siar are almost never returned.
From Sunday’s front-page story by Gil Smart, “Gundel Funeral Home’s hard times bring complaints from clients and suppliers,” (click here).Apparently what prompted Sunday’s front-page article by Gil Smart is that the Lancaster Newspapers aren’t being paid for obituaries and losing the income. And they make a fortune off them. My father died this January and his obituary cost almost $500.00 (click here). You have no choice, you have no options – you just have to pay – $500.00!It’s outrageous and unconscionable and takes advantage of people in their moments of deepest sorrow and grief.And as to Smart’s claim that they were “riddled with errors,” well, that takes me by surprise because the woman who “edited” my father’s at LNP apparently thought she knew more than a lawyer, a forty-plus-year school teacher, a man who went to Harvard and a man who graduated from MIT! She changed capitalizations and cited reasons! Oh, that the LNP editors should be so accomplished!My father was one of the original founders of the Lancaster Independent Press. I’m not sure why that was omitted (by my father and family) but obviously things are now quite complex. But LIP was started because the Lancaster Newspapers had a monopoly on news in Lancaster County and the papers were ultra conservative and racist. Nothing has changed.But charging a huge amount of money for publishing pre-written pieces at times of great sorrow in people’s lives is unacceptable. And unless LNP makes major changes, they will lose the obituary notices completely as they have lost the classified advertising.Tomorrow, my conversation with now Executive Editor Ernie Schreiber and his claim that Craigslist is the reason the Lancaster Newspapers don’t cover the Lancaster Police and the unsolved, brutal murder of 83-year-old Erma Kaylor.2 responses to “FAMILIES ARE FUMING?”
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Just so utterly typical. They charge almost 500 dollars and then go in and edit something that is basically a paid advertisement (no insult intended.) I skimmed the obit and saw the capitalization of the word “Army” when of course it should have been “army” – it’s only capitalized when you write it out completed as in US Army or the Army of the United States.
But this is so typical of the Lancaster “rules” mentality. I’ve read some real humdinger obituaries in other newspapers that were bought and paid for by families. I don’t think you are going to find that in Lancaster.
Speaking of racism in the paper, I am pretty confident that there are descendants of Lydia Hamilton Smith still living in Lancaster. Wonder why the crack investigative team didn’t track some of them down for their Thaddeus Stevens’ article? Oh, I forgot… there are no minorities in Lancaster. Never mind….
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hereshecomes January 31st, 2013 at 13:30
When did LNP start editing obituaries? Last thing I heard, they were written by the family with help from the funeral director. And don’t they still charge by length? It wasn’t too long ago that obits frequently ran that should have been edited, sometimes because, in what I figured was an attempt to save words, they read like telegrams.
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