Whitney: Beyond news obits

Before and after.                               Photo credit: Avaris.org

Unless you are living under a rock, you have probably heard that Whitney Houston, the queen of pop music in the 1980s and 1990s, died over the weekend.  The second-day news stories, such as this one in the L.A. Times, are investigating links to her well-known drug use.

You can read much, much more about her death with a simple Google News search, like this.

Why do we, as feature writers, care?  Because we are called on to provide much of this coverage. That might be obvious with an entertainment figure like Whitney Houston, but the same applies for prominent politicians, community leaders, sports figures, business leaders, and so on.

While news reporters might handle the initial notices of a person's death, feature writers are challenged to fill in the interesting details, find cultural significance, gauge emotional reaction, give human meaning to the event beyond the grief of the immediate family.  This most often takes the form of a tribute piece, but there are many ways to approach a death — as witnessed by Entertainment Weekly's flood-the-zone coverage.

We can, for example, compare and contrast these two stories in the New York Times: first-day obit and second-day tribute.

New Yorker magazine had one of the earliest tribute pieces I saw on the Web. Salon.com's own tribute was also fast out of the gate.

What are the differences between an obit and a tribute piece?  What are the similarities between a profile of a living person and a tribute to a dead person?  What are the differences?  What are some of the various angles you've seen writers take to make their Whitney Houston coverage fresh and interesting?

For example, Nicholas Powers at Alternet.org used Houston's death as a jumping off point for an essay on race and class in America.

How would you approach her death if called on to write about it?  What angle would you take?  What message would you try to convey in your lede?

Be thinking about these questions, for some of you might decide to write a tribute piece as one of your key stories in coming weeks.