The Obit Project Premieres

When a person dies, an obituary is the traditional remembrance document. The local newspaper was the source of choice to publish, but today, it’s typically the funeral home website.

I’ve always felt — like the narrators/hosts of The Obit Project — that an obituary is more like a life resume after you are dead than an actual depiction of your life and the type of person you were. A written obituary is more like a listicle of roles you’ve held during your life. There’s nothing about your dreams — fulfilled or not — your regrets, and your proudest achievements.

I’ve always admired the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who said, “As is a tale, so is a life: Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

The Obit Project is a new podcast from Jad Abumrad (founder of Radiolab and creator of Dolly Parton’s America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man) and University of Montana Journalism Professor Jule Banville (An Absurd Result podcast), who teamed up to help journalists make a new kind of obituary (obit), through sound. From an obituary about a circus elephant, to one about a historian with an affection for ghosts, these are rich, honest stories about the lives of real Montanans after they die.

This twelve-episode series is a production of the Montana Media Lab at the UM School of Journalism that started with a class of college students learning about the long tradition of obituary writing. It culminated with creating a new form that explores universal truths, legacies and reckoning with the memories of those we love. Each episode is a narrative exploration of someone’s life and what they’ve left behind, aided by the voices of their friends, family and historical archives uncovered by the journalists.

Abumrad and Banville, former colleagues and current friends, worked with showrunner Mary Auld, director of the Montana Media Lab.

“After teaching students to write obits for more than a decade, this project and working with Jad again is such a gift,” said Banville. “I can’t wait for people to listen, to slow down and contemplate these stories that are really about life.”

At the University of Montana School of Journalism, students gain real-world journalism experience that builds them impressive portfolios, gets them their dream careers, and wins them national awards. In 2025, the UM J-School was named seventh in the nation by the national Hearst Journalism Awards.

The Montana Media Lab is an audio storytelling center at the University of Montana School of Journalism.

Montana Public Radio is a public service of the University of Montana and is licensed to the Montana University System. MTPR began as a student training facility in 1965. Since then it has become a media network serving western and central Montana and beyond. It broadcasts to a population of about 500,000 Montanans, with an estimated weekly audience of 80,000 listeners.

The Obit Project premiered on April 2nd, 2026, and will release episodes weekly 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.

Tink Media Podcast Consultant Wil Williams said of the show: “The Obit Project is a limited series exploring the lives of people (and sometimes… elephants!) and what they left behind by having their students craft them audio obituaries. It’s such a special, beautiful project that honestly I think speaks for itself.”

I concur with Will completely. We go through life writing our own narrative every day. Then, when we die, our life is summarized in a few paragraphs by someone else, usually a loved one. In The Obit Project, our life story isn’t edited for length but retold by those who knew us best, sometimes even better than we knew ourselves.