LifeTimeline
LifePosts
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Conception
As with all types of conception, it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the exact moment.
I started thinking about this when I was working for the Knight Foundation & the FCC studying the collapse of local newspapers. One of the unstudied consequences was the decline of obituaries and articles about other major life milestones (births, weddings, job promotions etc).
This got personal because my wife, Amy, is a newly-minted funeral director. She kept coming home with stories of incredible people she’d worked with who didn’t have any acknowledgement.
This led to the realization that the opportunity and need went way beyond trying to replace the old obituaries to creating a new way of memorializing and creating biographies for loved ones. -
Gestation
Research, research and more research -- especially about what were the best storytelling tools out there. I started to realize that the gap that existed around the memorialization also was there for life celebrations, for slightly different reasons. We have many ways to capture micro-moments but it's surprisingly hard to craft, curate, and control a commemoration that draws in friends and family to help, and which can be easily preserved.Amy Cunningham
A website is born, and its birth is much more attractive than sausage being made. -
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An amazing staff arrives
A team! Ju-Don Marshall Roberts – the former managing editor of The WashingtonPost.com and Executive Vice President of Beliefnet – joins as Chief Operating Officers. Then Ned Berke, founder of one of the best local news startups (Sheepshead Bites) becomes senior editor. -
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