Obituaries & the Dead Policy
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/policies/obituaries-dead · Effective October 16, 2026
How a publication treats the dead is how it will eventually treat everyone. This page states the law of death in our pages — who learns first, what is verified, what an obituary owes the truth, and what the permanent archive owes the remembered. Every sentence here is kept today.
1. The Two Instruments
1.1. A news obituary is journalism: written by this desk, verified like all our work, and owned by the record.
1.2. A death notice is the family's voice: a submission carried in the family's words, labeled as theirs, and governed by the submission machinery of the Contributor Terms. The two are distinct classes and are never blended — the reader always knows whether the desk or the family is speaking.
2. Notification First
2.1. No one learns of their person's death from our pages. A name publishes after next of kin know, or after official public identification — whichever the circumstance makes right — as the Crime and Naming Policy already requires.
2.2. The narrow exception is the death that occurs in full public view, where withholding the name would be theater. Even there, the family's hours come before our minutes wherever the two can both be honored.
3. We Bury No One on a Rumor
3.1. Death is verified first-class before it is published: family, official confirmation, or the attending institution. No death publishes on social-media sourcing alone, on aggregation, or on the confidence of the crowd.
3.2. The premature obituary is the grimmest correction a publication can owe, and this desk declines to ever owe one. Withholding over guessing was written for exactly this hour.
4. The Honest Obituary
4.1. A news obituary is the record of a whole life, verified. For a public life, that includes what was hard, contested, or unfinished about it — written with proportion, because hagiography is a rendering wearing a record's clothes, and the Provenance Policy forbids the costume.
4.2. For a private person, proportion means the life lived, not an audit. The obituary of a schoolteacher is not the place this publication settles scores no reader asked it to settle.
4.3. Death neither launders nor indicts: criticism of the newly dead meets the same verification it met in life, and praise does too.
5. Suicide and Overdose
5.1. Where the record genuinely needs such coverage — a public figure, a public event, a matter of public health — it is written to inform without instructing: no method detail, no site treated as instruction, no romance, and no single-cause story told about a death that medicine itself would not tell one about.
5.2. A private person's cause of death is not the record's business absent the family's wish or genuine public significance. Where coverage does touch these subjects, the work points to support resources where the publication maintains that practice, and the writing stays precise and humane throughout.
6. The Dead in Breaking News
6.1. In disaster and violence, identification follows Section 2, children fall under the Coverage of Minors Policy absolutely, and the dead are counted as people, not as a scoreboard — names, when they run, run as remembrance.
6.2. We do not publish identifiable imagery of the dead. The record of catastrophe is made without displaying its victims; the rare documentary necessity — an image history itself requires — is a masthead-level decision taken in writing against this page, with the Imagery and Provenance Policies on top.
7. The Dead and the Archive
7.1. An obituary is permanent under the Archive and Permanence Terms — the kindest permanent page this record keeps, and for many names the only one. It is built to be found by grandchildren.
7.2. A family's correction to the record of their dead — a date, a name, a fact of the life — moves to the front of the correction clock as a matter of dignity, and is received as a kindness to the record, not a complaint against it.
7.3. Later-discovered truth about the dead is handled as the Record Policy handles all aging pages: annotation in daylight, the record honest in both directions, never rewritten to flatter and never ambushed by stealth.
8. Death Does Not Open the Diary
8.1. The dead cannot consent, so their privacy is weighed as it was in life: private matters publish only where the record genuinely needs them, and the burden rises — not falls — when the person can no longer answer.
8.2. The living carry the consequences of what we print about the dead, and their interests — a spouse's, a child's — are weighed in every judgment under this page.
9. Legacy Requests
9.1. A family's request about our coverage of their dead is heard through the Accountability Policy's door with the archive's weight acknowledged, answered with reasons, and remedied within the Record Policy's grammar: annotation, the later chapter, correction on the evidence.
9.2. Never erasure for grief alone — the record stands — and never, from anyone, for payment, as the Crime and Naming Policy's not-for-sale rule already makes absolute.
10. The Record of This Policy
10.1. This policy is kept in dated versions at its address, so the care owed any remembered name can always be checked — for as long as the name is remembered here, which is forever.
This policy is one of the Policies this publication keeps.