What’s the most important part of any newspaper?
As much as I’d love to tell you the answer is investigative local stories, it’s not. It’s the obituaries.
And lately, I’ve heard from several of you readers that our new obituary format – let me sum up the consensus – “sucks,” although we’ve made some changes, so it should suck less now than it did two weeks ago.
I probably should have warned you a few weeks ago that our obituary format would be changing, so consider this column better late than never.
First, some fundamentals: The newsroom has no oversight over the obituaries. Like the practice at most papers, our obituaries are bought and paid for by surviving family members, so the obituary column here is under the purview of our classified advertising section. However, our classifieds personnel had nothing to do with the format change either.
That change is owed to a new computer system instituted by our Richmond-based corporation.
I won’t bore you with the details, but the bottom line is this: The typefaces available to us for obituaries do not include our typical body type of Nimrod. And no, I’m not making that up. In fact, you’re reading this column in Nimrod. Some of you might believe you’re reading a column written by a nimrod in Nimrod.
I like the typeface Nimrod because it is so readable. According to ascenderfonts.com, “Released by Monotype in 1980, Nimrod™ Family was designed to take advantage of contemporary newspaper technology. After extensive research into the needs of the newspaper industry, British designer Robin Nicholas came up with his hardy and highly legible solution. Nimrod Family retains characteristics of classic Ionic newspaper types, but tones down the details in favor of a more neutral design. Nimrod’s carefully-shaped letterforms make dense amounts of text easier to read. The sturdy typeface holds up to the wear-and-tear of modern newspaper production and high-speed printing. Nimrod Family has been employed by a number of newspapers and other text-heavy publications, including London’s ‘Guardian’ near the end of the twentieth century and the 1990 edition of the ‘Concise Oxford English Dictionary’. Although text legibility was Nimrod’s original claim to fame, the typeface has an appealing character when used for display work. Character Set: Latin-1, WGL Pan-European (Eastern Europe, Cyrillic, Greek and Turkish).”
While the current body type for the obituaries is no Nimrod, it’s still a fairly readable font called tpoynterGothicText. Quite honestly, it’s the best font available to us through this new computer software system, whose chief aim is to put all Media General properties on the same technological platform.
We ask that you give the new obituary format your open mind and a few weeks to see if it grows on you.
Truthfully, we can’t scrap the new format, but there’s no reason why we can’t further tweak it.
And while the newsroom would love to have oversight over the obituaries, there is one huge advantage in having it be a reader-paid service: You can pretty much extol any kind of virtue on the deceased without a fact check.
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.
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