Nytimes obits
I had just come back from writing my book about sports and I had spent a lot of time with sports people. The other one was in the sports department to cover the then New Jersey Nets, which didn’t appeal to me at all.ī.W.: Although I liked basketball, I didn’t relish going out to New Jersey every day and spending my time with athletes. WWD: What were your other choices aside from obit writer?ī.W.: One was in the business section.
They Are Wearing: Paris Couture Week Fall 2022 Before that, I wrote the On Stage and Off column in the early Nineties. I was the paper’s national cultural correspondent between 19. Before that I had been theater critic and a theater columnist. When I came back - the paper had promised to hold a job for me, but they didn’t tell me what the job was going to be - there were two or three possibilities, and obits seemed like the most interesting one. WWD: How did you get assigned the obit beat?īruce Weber: I ended up in obits because I had gone off to write a book about baseball umpires. The journalist, who joined The Times as a staff editor for the Sunday magazine section in 1986, caught up with WWD to talk about his most memorable stories, how he approaches writing about the dead, and whether his departure is indicative of a larger obit for print media. Last week, he wrote his own farewell, penning a story on his resignation from the paper. You may choose to pay the fee in advance here or pay the fee at the door with cash, check or credit card.Bruce Weber - not that Bruce Weber - has spent more than eight years writing obituaries for The New York Times. So please sign up for lunch here, on Eventbrite. And he was an editor on the team that won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the series, "How Race Is Lived in America."īill will be questioned by two former Times reporters who have written their share of obituaries for Bill and his predecessors. He came to the job after a distinguished career at The Times and Newsday in a number of editorial positions, including deputy culture editor and arts and leisure editor. In addition to being a sort of Grim Reaper and deciding who gets a sendoff, he has written annual roundups of the year’s deaths in lyrical fashion and edited several book-length collections of obituaries.
The Place: The National Arts Club, Gramercy Park So put your work duds on and come to Gramercy Park. Bill will speak to the Silurians at our first in-person luncheon since Covid blew a hole in our bow. No one can answer these questions better than Bill McDonald, who has been The Times’ obituaries editor for 16 years. So how does The Times decide who gets an obituary? And how are they written? And how do the writers go about conducting interviews for the obits of people who are still very much alive? The page might memorialize a secretary of state or a woman who made plaster casts of the genitalia of rock singers. Produced by some of the grey lady’s finest writers, they are miniature biographies that tell us why a person was important or interesting or notorious and how he or she became that way. Perhaps no newspaper does obituaries better than The New York Times.
As Carl Reiner said, if he doesn’t find his obit in the paper, he can go and have his breakfast. About this Eventįor many readers, obituaries are the first sections they turn to when they open their morning paper. The New York Times obituary editor Bill McDonald in dialogue with living Silurians on the quick and the dead.