My Irish grandmother Norah Kelly use to open The Boston Globe first thing every morning to the obituaries, which she fondly called “the Irish sports pages.” While some filled their days talking about the Red Sox, she and her friends found the obits a much more satisfying topic of conversation. (And Norah was quite pleased when I got a job in high school writing obituaries for the local paper. The obits, she knew, mattered.)
Now I find that one of the only reasons I read my local newspaper is the obituaries. Two weeks ago I opened the paper and learned that one of my all-time favorite clients had died of cancer at just 59 years old. I was glad to know the news. Yet I thought, “what if I had been out of town as usual? I would have missed that. What else have I missed?”
The second thing I wondered was how best to send a note to her teenage daughter as I couldn’t find a mailing address.
The third thing was, “what happens when the local paper goes under,” which by the looks of things could be this year. How will I stay on top of my Irish sports pages?
That’s why Tributes.com is such an interesting and potentially big business concept. You can set up alerts for obituaries, write tributes to people who have died that others can also contribute to, and you can email that former client’s daughter about just how generous, funny and smart a woman her mother was.
In this deep recession old business models will die, but new ones like Tributes will find a market.