Obits by phone comes up in Delta College's FM Forum

Michigan editor John Hiner tells a radio audience of a plan to make obituary information available via phone.

The statement came during a discussion of changes coming to The Bay City Times, The Flint Journal (where I once worked) and The Saginaw News.

Hiner, who serves as executive editor of the three Booth (Advance Publications) newspapers tells readers to watch for an upcoming announcement in comments under a video recently posted

(One of the last things I did for The Journal was shut down a service that delivered local weather, lottery numbers, music of local bands, breaking news and other information by phone.

Still working when I left was Newsline, a service through the National Federation of the Blind that converted all editorial newspaper content and paid obituaries to audio files on demand. Those files also were retrieved via a touchtone phone. Earlier, The Journal had worked with a Flint non-profit that first organized volunteers who read the news.