Obituary

A necrology is a register or list of records of the deaths of people related to a particular organization, group or field, which may only contain the sparsest details, or small obituaries.

[5] The Los Angeles Times' obituary of Elizabeth Taylor, for example, was written in 1999 after three months of research, then often updated before the actress' 2011 death.

One example is The New York Times' obituary of Taylor, written by the newspaper's theater critic Mel Gussow, who died in 2005.

[11] Former New York Times obituary writer Margalit Fox wrote that "as a general rule, when lives are long enough, accomplished enough and complex enough that we would just as soon not get caught short writing them on deadline, advances are assigned".

[9] In another case, Nigel Farndale, an obituaries editor for The Times, said that in April 2020, when news broke that then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in an intensive care unit with COVID-19 during the pandemic, he was under considerable pressure to quickly prepare an obituary that could be immediately published if Johnson died from the disease.

[13] The newspaper began drafting an obituary for Queen Elizabeth II when she was still heir apparent, and it was rewritten in its entirety multiple times until her death in 2022.

In November 2020, Radio France Internationale accidentally published about 100 prewritten obituaries for celebrities such as Queen Elizabeth II and Clint Eastwood.

In this regard, some people seek to have an unsuspecting newspaper editor publish a premature death notice or obituary as a malicious hoax, perhaps to gain revenge on the "deceased".

To that end, nearly all newspapers now have policies requiring that death notices come from a reliable source (such as a funeral home), though even this has not stopped some pranksters such as Alan Abel.