| By Bret Thompson, ProgressOhio - Jun 28th, 2009 at 9:56 am EDT |
Google has an auto-complete feature where it offers you suggestions as to what you might be looking for based on what you've typed so far.
The most common search term for every major paper in Ohio? Obituaries.
Hopefully, all of our papers will stay healthy for a long time to come, but if they don't, is there a logical altenate outlet for obituaries? If Google is any indication death notices are a popular, if often overlooked service. Can neighborhood papers fill the void? Will a dominant commercial internet site sprout up, even though running ads directly off of an obituary would be tacky? Or is this yet another newspaper service that craigslist or a similarly non-commercial entity might take up?
Related: just how widely distributed are Ohio's newspapers? As of the end of the March, The Plain Dealer was the nation's 18th largest paper with a Sunday circulation of 291,630. The Columbus Dispatch and The Cincinnati Enquirer came in near the bottom of the top 50, with circulation numbers of 195,510 and 188,956, respectively. The Blade, Dayton Daily News and Akron Beacon Journal all have very similar circulation numbers, ranging from 110,728 to 106,747.
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