I noticed Atlanta magazine recently had my old colleague, Kay Powell, write an advance obituary for the print edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, dying at age 157 on Dec. 31, 2025.
Cause of death — because newspapers always try to put that in obits — was “succumbing to the burgeoning digital age coverage.”
Or perhaps, more accurately, assisted suicide.
Powell became the AJC’s chief obituary writer in 1996 and helped transform obits into folksy renditions of the decedents’ lives.
By doing so, she became known nationally as the “Doyenne of the Death Beat.”