 It is indeed the case that obits for many of these major historical figures, presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, old-time silver screen stars, those are indeed written advance and the selection criterion is does this person have a life that it was so long in the public eye so rich so complex and so deeply documented that we wouldn't want to get caught short writing his or her obit on deadline of course very often we do because we're a small department and things happen suddenly right things happen rockers OD planes go down things happen but in general we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures so we do indeed have the advance obits all but the top as it were written edited on file we have about 1700 that said the vast majority of what my colleagues and I down in the trenches do probably 90% of our working life are daily obits that are found out about reported written edited copy edited put in the paper all in the space of a single day just like any other article in the paper