The Dead Are Waiting

The dead are waiting for traffic to ease before the story of their lives can make it to the pint pages of The New York Times. 

The obit desk is churning out so many obits that more appear online than in print. There's a backlog from the online pages to the print pages. It's like a morning traffic report that there are 30-40 minute delays getting though the Holland or Lincoln Tunnels and getting over the George Washington Bridge—upper or lower levels. Do the barely living need to be discouraged from dying? Will obit congestion pricing go into effect?

I have access to the NYT online edition through my home delivery subscription. I use the online editions for browsing and reference. At 75 I'm a creature for the print edition, and only look at the online edition to see what might hit the print edition. There is a lag.

Of the latest 11 online obits, 4 do not show anywhere as being in a print edition. Of the several from March 15—a day with six! tribute obits—there are two that appear in Sunday's, March 17 print edition. I purposely do not get the Sunday print edition. I have enough to do with doing newspaper deep dives than to add Sunday's pile to the mix. The home delivery people do however add the magazine,  Book Review, Arts, Metropolitan and Real Estate sections with my Saturday print delivery at no extra charge. So I already get about half of the Sunday edition to go through, but not the section with obituaries.

Last week I read a print Wall Street Journal story on J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ben Cohen. There was a reference to the name "Bethe" toward the end of the print edition that I could not find anywhere in all of the preceding text where the name had been mentioned. I looked many times and couldn't find it. 

When I dove into the online edition for the piece the name Hans Bethe was mentioned three times before the reference at the end. WTF?

I emailed Mr. Cohen and he responded nicely that they have to make cuts to the print size of a piece, and obviously made too deep a cut with what finally appeared in print. He promised they'd try and do better. Print space seems finite; but online space is not

It's kind of great that there are so many tribute obits to read, and it also seems better that they don't all appear as soon as they're ready to read in the print edition.

Unless the NYT adds a dedicated obituary section to compensate for their truncated New York sports coverage from The Athletic,  I guess there will now always be a delay before the online obits get the space to appear in the print editions.

The notable dead will just have to wait their turn at the tunnels and bridges to cross the river and get into the print edition of the NYT.

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