Even the Obit Writers Are Jumping Ship at The Washington Post

The obituary team doesn’t have that name-brand staff, but its fate actually matters quite a lot institutionally. Inside the newsroom, some staff have been told that regular reporters may be asked to bang out obits when someone on their beat dies. That’s a far cry from the traditional practice where a team of dedicated obituarists do the work — meticulously reporting life stories in advance, and then saving them on a separate server to keep the contents secret while the subject is still alive.

If you care about warts-and-all journalism, the change is a big deal. Unlike beat reporters, full-time obituary writers don’t have to worry about whether including unsavory details about the dearly departed will offend the grieving sources they still need to cultivate. Getting rid of them is a recipe for toothless pieces that pull punches about deceased power players.

It’s also a big deal for the culture of Washington. The Post’s obit pages have historically been a totem for a certain kind of Beltway-famous life story: The undersecretaries, ambassadors to second-tier countries and lobbyists for dictators whose deaths might not make the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

I know this first-hand: My dad was an ambassador to one of those second-tier countries. It felt important when his obituary was written up in the august pages of the Washington Post in 2017.

That sort of obit has already receded as Jeff Bezos’ ownership pivoted away from courting Washington-area audiences in favor of a global readership. Now, the evisceration of the paper’s obit section feels like a final blow to this establishment-D.C. rite of passage — landing just as the very same permanent-Washington establishment comes under disorienting assault from the Trump administration.

“When you see someone’s obit in the newspaper, that is confirmation that that person mattered,” said John Pope, a Pulitzer-winning longtime obituary writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Shrinking staffs mean there’s less ability to do just that. “It’s the toughest thing for me to say, ‘Sorry, but your Aunt Petunia just didn’t measure up.’” In Washington, where mattering matters more, it’s a particularly tough adjustment.

The obituary exits are part of a broader exodus of top talent from the Post, ranging from columnist Jonathan Capehart to pioneering sports blogger Dan Steinberg and Tik Tok trailblazer Dave Jorgenson. The departures are particularly pronounced in the opinion section, where Bezos earlier this year declared that the publication would henceforth only publish items in support of free markets and civil liberties.

In the media business, the buyout has led to something of a feeding frenzy, with numerous staffers taking the money and then swinging to outlets like The Athletic and The Atlantic. One veteran Post editor told me about getting a call at 9:30 in the evening from a New York Times recruiter asking about a couple of potential hires from the Post. The editor remarked that the recruiter was working rather late, and the recruiter said that the Times higher-ups had them working double shifts in the name of settling on who to poach before the end-of-July deadline.

Beyond the familiar media-in-crisis storyline, there’s something particularly poignant about the hollowing out of the obituary staff. Reporters or (ahem!) columnists might be let go; the work of digging up scoops or making arguments continues. It’s not clear whether the same can be said for the work of writing unflinchingly about deceased notables. In dropping obits — or just limiting them to only the best-known people — an organization abandons something that used to be a basic element of being the paper of record.

“Obits are one of the three or four most essential elements in creating what Bezos calls the daily habit” of news consumption, said Marc Fisher, a longtime Metro columnist who took a previous Post buyout (and today continues to write on a contract for the opinion section).

As a business proposition, it’s a conundrum. The Post pulled back on smaller-time obituaries in part because they got so little attention online. A few decades ago, the standard for inclusion was simply having lived in Washington for 20 years.

Yet many paying subscribers — the readers a media company covets more than random online visitors — are fiercely devoted to obits, reading them first. Like coverage of high school football or hometown socialites, they’re also a way for a publication to make itself central to its community.

In the Washington of the second Trump era, that community is already feeling unprecedented disruption that has nothing to do with media staffing decisions. The tumult wrought by the mass federal firings and agency closures has upended the elites who used to count on getting written up once they die. In the current context, not earning a Washington Post obituary may be the least of their problems. Yet it adds to the general sense of withering institutions and evaporating hierarchies.

“They are not only a place to memorialize people who had what I call good Washington lives, but also a place where people who are interested in good Washington lives go to learn, to see how they got their start or how they got into government,” said Tevi Troy, a longtime conservative policy hand who frequently posts links to Post obituaries on social media. “You work in one of these jobs, like undersecretary or something, and you’re a big deal in one administration, maybe. But you’re not, like, Schwarzenegger famous. And then you’re out. But when you die, you get written up because it mattered how you got there and what you did. I often read one and think, ‘I wish I could have read this before he died.’”

In the world of obituaries the news will land hard for other reasons. The Post maintained its obituary desk even as big newspapers like the Los Angeles Times slashed theirs, to the dismay of the obit obsessives who flock to conferences about the form and buy up anthologies like Getting Off at Elysian Fields, a book-length collection of Pope’s New Orleans obits.

Bernstein himself is something of a rock star in that world, combining storytelling with hard-edged reporting and a love for characters. Where many newspapers used the obit department as a place to put reporters out to pasture, Bernstein took over the desk in 2008 at age 34 because he was a lifelong devotee of the form. Among his fans: Bezos, who called Bernstein out during his first visit after buying the Post in 2013. Discussing recent pieces he’d enjoyed, the new owner cited Bernstein’s obituary for a bouncer at D.C.’s 9:30 Club.

Now the New York Times, where the obituary desk is a juggernaut that has been the subject of a documentary and created an attention-getting special series, is almost the only game left in town when it comes to full-service obit staffs.

The reality of shrunken competition was right there in Times obituaries editor Bill McDonald’s announcement of Bernstein’s hiring. Noting that a colleague had once likened McDonald’s occasional email exchanges with then-rival Bernstein to “Macy’s talking to Gimbels,” McDonald concluded by saying, “I’m happy to report that Macy’s and Gimbels are now merging.”

Readers of the Post, though, may not notice immediately: I’m told that there are still roughly 900 pre-written obits in the can, waiting for God to decide on when to lift the embargo.