After 49 years in journalism, William McDonald’s recent retirement was well-earned. For the past 20 years, McDonald was The New York Times’ obituaries editor. In July, E&P spoke with him about his remarkable career; how the obituaries team operated; and his thoughts on life and death.
McDonald studied English in undergrad school. He aspired to write fiction and poetry, and he sought a profession for which writing was an essential skill. He enrolled in Syracuse University’s master’s program in journalism and embarked on a year of intensive study. His first job out of j-school was at Greenwich Time in Greenwich, Connecticut, a community newspaper now owned by Hearst Connecticut Media Group. He wrote about the police, the fire department, the planning and zoning commission, and town government.
His career path then took him to Long Island, New York, to Newsday, and finally to The New York Times. He began as a copyeditor at the Times; he worked on the metro desk, the national desk, and edited the Culture and Arts & Leisure sections over the course of his career there. McDonald won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for a series he edited, “How Race Is Lived in America.”
He recalled being intrigued when the position for the Times’ obituaries editor opened up. It appealed to his interests in history, biography and narrative storytelling. And just as he expected, he found the work “endlessly interesting.”
Because of the pace of news and the public’s expectations for breaking-news immediacy, many of the obituaries written for prominent people are often pre-authored well in advance of their deaths, leaving just the finer details to fill in when they ultimately die. The week E&P spoke with McDonald, actor Sam Neill and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham died.
“You have to be ready at the drop of a hat when you hear about a major death,” said McDonald. “There’s great demand — from the management at the Times, the newsroom management, but also the public, who is clamoring to know more.”
McDonald estimated that the Times had approximately 2,500 obituaries “ready to go” at the time of his retirement.
Writing an obituary about someone still alive has its benefits. McDonald said he’d encourage the writing team to reach out for comment to the living subjects of their work. Knowing that what they’d reveal wouldn’t be published until after they were dead sometimes inspires candor or vulnerability.
“For example, we interviewed Ed Koch before he died, and he had some uncharitable things to say about Mario Cuomo,” McDonald recalled.
Conversely, some subjects take offense to being asked about their looming demise — Hollywood celebrities, in particular. “They never age, as we all know,” he joked.
But one’s death is such a tiny matter in a well-crafted obituary. Rather, the “story” is of a life lived — recounting it wholly and fairly, including the unflattering parts, McDonald explained.
“We once did an obituary on a mob figure, and the family was very unhappy that we portrayed him in a negative light, but he was a big name in the mob, a headline name,” he said.
McDonald described how the obituary writers would research a person’s entire life, “from cradle to the grave.” Even if obituary subjects were best known for a singular achievement — like winning a Nobel Prize — delving into their formative years can be illuminating. McDonald said they wrote many obituaries about people who’d overcome serious childhood illnesses, like polio, or rose out of abject poverty.
Asked about some of the most memorable obituaries he wrote or edited over the years, McDonald said the list is long, but he singled out a few that came to mind. The first was Donald W. Duncan’s obituary.
“He was a former Green Beret master sergeant. He returned from Vietnam disillusioned about the war. He became an anti-war figure, fairly prominent in his day,” McDonald said. “He quit the Army and became one of the war’s fiercest critics. He wrote a memoir and magazine articles. He appeared at anti-war rallies with people like Joan Baez, Jane Fonda, Norman Mailer and the Berrigan brothers.”
Duncan had passed away years before his obituary ran in The New York Times. The Times researchers found just a tiny mention of his death in a local Ohio newspaper. Because he was a significant figure — and since his obituary did not see wide circulation at the time of his death — the obits team decided to publish their own.
McDonald also recalled the memorable obituaries for Malcolm Toon, a Cold War-era ambassador to the Soviet Union, and artist Donald Featherstone, the inventor of the pink flamingo lawn statue.
Over the years, and especially in the age of digital comment sections, McDonald heard from readers, both complaints and praises.
“It’s gratifying in many ways to hear back from readers,” he said. “Most of the time, they were thanking us for writing about people who may have otherwise slipped under the radar. The whole idea of interacting with the readership, I think, is a good idea. It’s the wave of the future, and the Times does it in many different ways; the comment section is just one.”
“We have to be very selective with whom we write about,” he said. “Everybody has a story, but we can’t write about everybody. There are just too many people in the world, so we had to be very, very selective. I think what I brought to the role was a feel for language and just simple news judgment about who is most consequential.”
Over the course of his 20 years editing the obituaries section, McDonald estimated they published approximately 24,000 of the posthumous biographies.
“I don’t know that I emerged with any profound philosophical insight that anyone else doesn’t have,” said McDonald. “I think it made me much more conscious of the fragility of life.”
Gretchen A. Peck is Editor & Publisher’s editor-in-chief. She welcomes your emails at editor@editorandpublisher.com.
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