Bring Out More Dead

If the Post has truly cracked the code of what works on newspaper blogs, well, we’ve been doing it wrong; see “What Doesn’t Work,” bullet point No. 1. But heaven knows a whole bunch of Post blogs are in violation of rule number four of the nine-point checklist, which says a blog must be updated once every weekday. (I’m looking at you, Post I.T.) If WaPo managers do start cracking the whip on the productivity end, I’d be happy to see more of Post Mortem, which is written by paper’s obituary writers.

Post Mortem is the only Post blog that I’ve been inspired to add to my RSS feedreader; I’m not particularly morbid, but I am an adherent to the argument that obits are often the best-written stories in the paper. (One of my all-time favorite ledes comes from this New York Times obit.) Mainly, I’m a sucker for the weird, picayune details that tend to emerge only on the death beat: the BLS staffer who Nixon accused of being part of a Jewish cabal; the Army lieutenant colonel who turned out to have a second career as a hotel pianist; and the always-hilarious dead person who isn’t actually dead.

A couple weeks back the blog tried to get itself moving more often by launching a daily roundup of obits. Alas, like many attempts to launch a regular feature on a blog, it’s, uh, dead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Famous People, Media, New York Times, Obituaries, Washington Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.