Obituaries online: new connections with the living--and the dead

This study examines online obituary pages at nine major U.S. daily newspapers seeking to understand how these sites use new technologies, and how they publicly portray people's lives and deaths. These mainstream dailies provide a forum, and potentially large audiences, for mourners who send messages to the dead, express emotion, and tell stories. They also facilitate connections between readers and build new kindsof virtual communities. This represents a departure from traditional obituary content. Indeed, the "cyber obit" now allows the bereaved to help frame the death stories and build the memorials, liberated from the linear, non-interactive formats of the past. This study builds on work of bereavement scholars as well as literature in journalism and mass communication.