UM students reimagine obituaries in podcast series

MISSOULA – A new podcast series emerging from the University of Montana is reshaping one of journalism’s oldest forms – the obituary – by asking student reporters to listen more closely to the lives behind the loss.

“The Obit Project,” a 12-episode audio series produced through the Montana Media Lab, allows student journalists to work with professional mentors to create richly reported, narrative obituaries told through sound. The project, which premiered April 2, blends traditional reporting with intimate audio storytelling, exploring the lives of Montanans through the voices of those who knew them.

The idea began in a classroom.

“It started in a class we have here at UM called Feature Writing – that class is super open to assigning all kinds of stories – the idea is that we let students stretch a little bit as writers and go after more character-driven stories,” said Jule Banville, a professor at the UM School of Journalism.

For years, Banville required students to write reported obituaries – a practice rooted in a tradition that has largely faded from modern newsrooms.

“A lot of newspapers used to have ‘obit desks,’ where reporters would be assigned to write obits by interviewing people,” she said. “But in the last decades, obits are mostly written by families.”

Banville’s assignment asked students to go beyond the basic facts of a life and instead search for meaning.

“My students modeled this way of really listening to people and writing these beautiful, universal stories that were not about people's deaths,” she said. “They were about their lives – about what really matters.”

The project began to take form when Banville reconnected with longtime friend Jad Abumrad, a former colleague at WNYC in New York City who founded “Radiolab” and created “Dolly Parton’s America,” among other popular podcasts. Over dinner, the two began imagining what those written obituaries might sound like.

The concept was simple: Teach students to report obituaries as audio stories instead of written pieces. But the execution required students to confront both technical challenges and emotional terrain.

“I’ve reported many stories that are obit-adjacent, but truthfully I’d never set out to intentionally create an obituary,” Abumrad said. “I think I was attracted to the idea of obituaries because it’s a musty old form that’s been made remarkably flexible in the internet age. I liked the idea that we could toy around with the form. I also loved the human drama of young reporters confronting death. And Jule and I fell in love with the characters they found.”

For student reporter Lotus Porte-Moyel, the project became both personal and transformative. Her story focused on Montana historian Ellen Baumler – someone she had admired since childhood in Helena.

“I’ve always been interested in death and the ways that we remember people, which I realized clearly by the time I was done with that class,” Porte-Moyel said.

Her reporting required building trust with sources who were grieving while also shaping a narrative that honored Baumler’s life.

“By the end of the process, it was wild because I was essentially attempting to do for her what she did for a lot of people,” Porte-Moyel said. “She did so much as an interpretive historian for the state. I wanted to know more about the history of this person and who she is maybe beyond her love of history and what I already knew of her.”

For Jacob Baynham, now an adjunct assistant professor at the journalism school, the project offered a different kind of challenge. His story centered not on a person, but on a circus elephant known as Old Pit, killed by lightning in 1943 in Dillon.

“Just to be straight, it was really hard to write about an elephant,” Baynham said. “I think the beauty of an obituary is that you try to get inside someone’s head and understand why they made the decisions they did, and you can’t really do that to a creature that’s not a human.”

Instead, Baynham’s story evolved into a narrative about the people connected to the elephant, particularly Jack Kirkley, a UM-Western professor emeritus of biology, who has become a local expert on Pit’s lore.

“In a big sense, the story actually was a living profile,” he said. “Jack left the bones, but he dug up the story.”

Like many students in the program, Baynham was new to audio reporting. He said the experience forced him to rethink how stories are written and told.

“I definitely learned that a good lyrical sentence in print doesn’t translate to a good sentence in audio,” he said. “I learned to be shorter. I learned to get to the point. I learned to write like I would speak.”

The power of audio, he added, lies in its immediacy.

“You get the tape and then you get out of the way, because no one says it better than the 83-year-old potato farmer who is recalling the day that he was there when an elephant got hit by lightning,” Baynham said.

For Banville, that emphasis on listening – both to sources and to the stories themselves – is at the heart of the project’s mission. The podcast was edited and produced in collaboration among Banville, Abumrad and Mary Auld, director of the Montana Media Lab. Additionally, the project was financially supported through the UM Flagship Fund, which invests in initiatives and projects from the University community that have the potential to translate vision into action.

“The best audio stories — and, I would say, the best feature stories, too — help the listener or the reader feel more human,” Banville said. “It's good when we feel things for strangers.”

That emotional resonance, she said, is what makes obituary storytelling so powerful, especially in audio form.

“What I often hear in these stories that start with death is joy,” Banville said. “There's a lot of joy mixed with loss in this podcast. And that’s what memory is like — joy and loss — and I think these stories really capture that. I'm really proud of that part of it.”

As the series reaches audiences beyond the classroom, Banville hopes it demonstrates not only the potential of student journalists, but also the enduring value of deeply reported stories.

“When students are pushed to do big, hard stories at the J-school – audio or otherwise – we have consistently found our students can rise to the challenge,” she said.

Episodes for “The Obit Project” are released weekly and are available on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Castbox and Pocket Casts. Versions of some stories will also air on Montana Public Radio.