A Death in the Industry (Or Family).

So the blog assignment for this week was to compare wedding announcements from two different newspapers to see what that might reveal about the organizations, readership, etc. However, with roughly twenty other people doing the same thing, that felt a little overdone, so I decided to do it with a twist, and looked at obituaries instead. In a way, I think these are actually a bit more telling, since they tend to delve more into the lives of the individual. At any rate, the first obit I looked at comes from the (e-)pages of the LA Times, eulogizing Jerome Horowitz, a medical researcher who spent most of his career at Wayne State University. The second is an obituary for Bob Morse, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And frankly, the difference between the two is pretty striking. Dr. Horowitz’s obit focuses primarily on his accomplishments as a researcher; evidently, he helped develop an early drug to fight AIDS, something we learn from the title alone. The obit actually spends a pretty significant chunk space discussing the life of his drug, AZT, as well as the other scientific ventures of which Dr. Horowitz was a part. It seems fascinating to me that the space is equally devoted to his projects as to the man himself, and it also seems that the writer tried to place him within a larger historical context. This is likely an acknowledgement of the Times’ readership – they are trying both to remember this man who is of significance to a wide body of people, as well as to make his life interesting to a pretty wide and diverse audience. The obituary for Mr. Morse, on the other hand, seems much more personal; the language seems to focus on how much he was loved and how much he will be missed, rather than how much he accomplished. We are told some about his career, learning that he served in the Army in Vietnam, before returning home to teach and coach sports at a variety of schools, painting him as a sort of classic all-American working man (as opposed to Dr. Horowitz, whom we are explicitly told wished to escape the family poultry business). Now, the Post-Dispatch is a considerably smaller paper, and it is conceivable that an appreciable number of its readers had some connection to Mr. Morse (especially given his teaching position at schools in the area). We might even draw connections between stereotypes of West Coast people and Midwesterners, the former more consumeristic, the latter more preoccupied with family/American values. Whatever any of that’s supposed to mean.

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