The Living Tribute

William McDonald has retired as the obituary editor of the New York Times after 20 years on the job. Obviously, he can't take it anymore. (A joke.)

In yesterday's print edition on Page 2 where the editors of the Times like to crow about something they've done, some journalistic feat they've accomplished, there is a piece by Bill McDonald, about Bill McDonald. What are the chances of that?

Bill salts in a few details of his personal life, like how he is now 71 years old. But he mainly discusses how it seems to be a status symbol to have gotten an obit in the Times.

Bill describes a New Yorker cartoon that doesn't appear in the print edition, but is in the online edition, of someone being introduced at a cocktail party, with the implied intimation that he's famous enough that you will soon be reading his obituary. (He's old, get it?) Typical New Yorker humor. But it does say a lot.

People want a New York Times obituary about themselves. Bill describes the various means people have lobbied themselves to be so duly noted. Some have hired publicists to package the words to use. Bill has explained before, and does again, that the so-called tribute obit is meant to be on a subject whose passing is newsworthy, not just on someone who has stopped breathing. That's going to happen no matter what.

The caption to the above photo of Bill is from the 2016 film on the Times, "Obit," and the obit writers and the process. I saw the film, and it's hard to believe it was 10 years ago. A good number of the writers in the film have themselves retired or left the paper.

But while obit writing might have once been purgatory for misbehaving journalists, it is now a plum position that will result in sometimes multiple bylines on the same day. No one produces more words on the paper than the obit writers. To me, it is somewhat astonishing what they have uncovered about someone and the context of their times.

The obit in its art form today is newsworthy and highly informative of a person's life and the context of  the times they lived through. I have saved a person's obit just because it contains a perfect summary of say the 60s, 70s, even the 50s, eras, that at 77-years old I'm quite familiar with and appreciate the reminders of what things were like.

Marilyn Johnson's seminal book The Dead Beat, Lost Souls and Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries was published in 2006, another hard to believe elapsed time.

Ms. Johnson, then an obit writer herself, interviews various writers of the form and notes how it has gone from dry as toast prose to a story that is celebratory of one's life. A short story almost. The NYT obit editor at the Times then was Charles Strum.

A prior editor, Alden Whitman, was a character in himself, and when he passed away in1990 he merited a lively obit in the paper. (Not bylined.) No better sendoff was written than that by Gay Talese whose piece was titled, Mr. Bad News, and mentioned that Alden's wardrobe included an opera-style cape as part of his wardrobe.  

Mr. Whitman wrote the obit for Robert Oppenheimer, who passed away in 1967, and it's clear from the lede that is repeated in Whitman's own obituary, that he was a force in raising the obit's art form. 

There is no better example of how obituaries are being viewed than to see in today's Wall Street Journal a full page! tribute for William R. Berkley, 1945-2026, not as part of anything the paper is presenting, but a privately paid notice about Mr. Berkley.

The obit just underlines what Mr. McDonald is saying in his piece about the effort to cement immortality. 

I wonder if the family and business associates of Mr. Berkley flooded Bill's inbox trying to snare a tribute obit, but of course didn't pass the bar as a newsworthy obit. Mr. Berkley passed away June 9, 2026. The full page must have cost a small fortune.

And this is not a one off. A full page, self-promoted obit is a bit of an outlier, but anyone who really dives into a print editions of the New York Times, or even the Wall Street Journal, is familiar with seeing paid notices, with a photo and lots of text praising the subject's life and achievements.

I never met Mr. McDonald, but over the years we have traded a few emails and Tweets. There was one exchange in particular, probably Tweets that I can't retrieve, where I might have commented on the fact that he wrote the bylined obit for Joan Joyce, a softball pitcher extraordinaire who passed away in 2022.

Bill's name has not been on many bylines. He would write the recap at the end of the year of the lives that passed away. I distinctly remember commenting to him about his personal sendoff. He replied that as a boy he saw Joan pitch in an exhibition, or in a game, in Bridgeport, where he grew up.

With a name like McDonald, and his Irish-American looks, I theorized he grew up going to Catholic school and played basketball. He confirmed he had a decent jump shot.

On Bill's watch more obits have hit the front page than ever before. And not shy about getting two obits, side-by-side on the front page. This just happened with the passing of Clive Davis and Alan Greenspan. Both were below the fold, leading to what I describe as 19-gun salutes. Above the fold is a 21-gun salute. It does happen.

Bill' replacement? Likely Adam Bernstein, poached from the Washington Post in July 2025 where Adam was the obit editor and carried on the new tradition of getting the most there is about a person in the obit. An example of Adam's style is offered that the great movie director Billy Wilder wooed his future wife "promising to worship the ground she walked on, only if she moved to a better neighborhood."

When I read yesterday that Bill was retiring, I Tweeted (X'ed?) him good luck and mentioned that behind his back someone is already writing the advance obit on him.

Although Bill fairly resisted using anyone's unsolicited hagiographies of themselves, I think he's a clever man and has dropped some bread crumbs

He's not going to be forgotten.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com