The passing obituary:

If the newspaper business starts to die, one of its terrible casualties will be the star obituary. You've surely noticed, unless you can't bear to read an obit, that as soon as a famous person dies, newspapers print a wonderful, long, well-researched obituary. These articles are prepared in advance, and kept up to date, by reporters who somehow have time to work on them. In many cases, the featured people have been contacted about their obits, and may even have helped to write them. These short bios can be quite wonderful to read, so I'm sorry to say that I don't know who will write them in the future. Perhaps Wikipedia will fill this void, but even then, I doubt it will be the same.