Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.
Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins. But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your profit chasing. I mean those who pay the Chronicle for running their loved ones’ death notices on the paper’s obituary pages.
Sure, the paper’s not making anywhere near as much as it once did from other classified ads, but don’t try to make up for it by outrageously exploiting the saddened friends and families of the recently deceased.
The basic price for death notices is $16 per printed line per day – $112 per column inch (about seven lines of type). Those 1x1½ inch photos that sit atop many obits cost about $135 more. If you also want the obit on the Chronicle’s website, that will be another $25, please. And if you want the obit to run for a longer period, for say a week, that can get quite pricey – as much as $784 per inch. Read more »
