Owen Taylor - 10/24/2016 22:17
Keep in mind that many newspapers now charge for obits. Typically, there's a short notice for a flat fee. Or for longer pieces you'll pay by the word or some other measurement. In a more or less major paper you're talking about several hundred dollars for really long ones.
This varies by paper, size of market and so forth. I'm figuring that some weekly papers still don't charge. A lot of this has to do with less display advertising and fewer pages to fill. Before the internet, papers needed obits to take up space. That's not the way the world operates now. That's no slam against the papers. It's just simple economics.