Alex Beam, a terrific columnist for the Boston Globe, takes on the obit world in a column today.

Not sure who might care about all this but us handful of obit scribes. But for what it's worth, I know most of the people involved - I have attended both conferences discussed in Beam's story -- and believe this whole "schism" is overblown as far as the majority of the obit crowd is concerned.

Many of us obit writers see the value in both groups. Perhaps the most insightful commentary came in an e-mail from an Arizona Republic reporter, Connie Sexton, who has written obituaries for that paper.

"The wonderful thing about the New Mexico conference is that it elevates the awareness and appreciation of obituaries - from both a public and writer point of view," Sexton wrote.

"The wonderful thing about the SPOW conference, for me, is that it focused on the craft and industry of obituary writing," she added. "I thought it to be one of the best writing workshops I've ever attended because the topics were so specific. I came away with more tools on how to become a better obit writer."

Harvey Korman, who died yesterday, was among the masterful comic "straight men" of his generation on film and TV. Tim Conway and Carol Burnett were often more outrageous, but Korman's task could be harder, struggling to keep from laughing in light of the most implausibly hilarious situations.

The Washington Post feature "On Faith" showcases the insights of LA Times obit editor Jon Thurber, one of the sages of the obit craft. He's sensitive and thoughtful in a very difficult job.

A reader wrote in last week to criticize what she called the "derogatory and negative" tone of the recent obituary for Huntington Hartford II, the A&P heir whose quest to be taken seriously as a patron of the arts led him to drain much of his enormous fortune. Hartford died May 19 at 97.

"In almost half a page about the life of a man," the reader wrote, "I could not see one good thing written about this man. ... I can see how your piece can be rewritten with a positive note or two in it: He was a great philanthropist, he loved and supported the arts, he helped the artists and so on."

The nature of the letter raises a question about what readers expect from an obituary. Often readers mistake obituaries for eulogies, or at least stories focusing on positive legacies at the exclusion of anything remotely unsavory.

But really they are news stories. And like any story about, say, the White House or Wall Street finance, the writer should go where the facts take him or her. Often what helps eliminate the "derogatory" factor is to try to find quotations that illuminate the context of the person's foibles.

As obit writers, our mission is not to impose personal views on a person but to collect data that gives a fair portrait of a subject. Sometimes fair is a matter of corroborating what had been written in many previous articles about a man, to make sure the prevailing view of a person is accurate. This was the case with Huntington Hartford II, whose eccentric and at times disturbing life was well-chronicled.

He fathered a child out of wedlock with a chorus girl while married to the first or four wives. According to Vanity Fair magazine, HHII would have nothing to do with the illegitimate child, who later shot himself to death.

HHII was a patron of the arts but with very precise tastes. He hated anything considered modernist, whether the art of Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning or the novels of William Faulkner or the playwriting of Tennessee Williams.

It's fine to have such tastes, but HHII was a vocal antagonist of those artists, taking out advertisements lambasting their work as immoral.

He also spent enormous sums on a NYC museum dedicated to more-traditional art styles he liked, and the museum itself was considered one of the more controversial buildings in Manhattan. The New York Times obit for HHII called his Gallery of Modern Art "a folly or worse" and quoted its former architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable calling the gallery design a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops."

By most accounts, Hartford was a crummy businessman as well. He plowed $30 million into a resort in the Bahamas but lost it for $1 million because he did not invest in a gambling license. He wrote in Esquire magazine in 1968, "to most Americans the worst errors are financial, and in that respect I have been Horatio Alger in reverse."

As a young man during the Depression, he walked off one job to attend a college football game. He got a job as a reporter at the newspaper PM in New York because he invested $100,000 in the publication. He once told an interviewer -- perhaps apocryphally -- he could not turn in an assignment on time because there was no place to park his yacht.

During World War II, when he served in the Coast Guard and commanded a cargo vessel in the Pacific. He twice grounded the ship, one time because "I mistook feet for fathoms."

The Wall Street Journal blog "The Wealth Report" also noted Hartford's death and ran through his litany of bizarre behavior, which included a drug addiction that most sources have blamed on his fourth wife. Many writers took the blog in stride. But one writer felt compelled to oppose the prevailing view.

"I knew "Hunt" in the '70s," she wrote, "and yes he was surrounded by hanger-ons and his ridiculous last wife, but he was a kind man, who was very intelligent, excellent conversationalist and a good spirit. The fact that he wasn't good with his fortune should not take the place of a sweet soul."

Just returned from the inaugural meeting of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW), held in Portland, Ore., May 8 to 11. In preceding months, there had been debate over the name, with several wags hoping for some creepy acronym that spelled out words like COFFIN (Congress of something something something something) or VULTURES or REAPER, etc.

Good sense prevailed, even if SPOW sounds like the exclamatory description of a punch in a "Batman" cartoon.

The event attracted obit writers and editors at the Portland Oregonian, Los Angeles Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami Herald, the Arizona Republic, Toronto Globe and Mail, among a bunch of smaller papers in Alaska and California.

There were two distinguished authors as well: Heather Lende, author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name" (2005), an acclaimed book about volunteering and writing obits for her neighbors in close-knit Haines, Alaska; and Jim Sheeler, a Colorado reporter who won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for stories about a Marine Corps major delivering news to families about their sons who had died in Iraq.

It was an invigorating gathering, kicked off the evening of May 8 at a bar that had until recently been one of the nicest funeral homes in the city. The new owners took the atmosphere to extremes, including an organ that played somber versions of pop songs. That aside, amid much beer, we all celebrated the obituary form, agreeing it was the gem of the newsroom and a vital way of touching the community.

Obit writers are actually a pretty lively bunch, reveling in the dark humor like the doctors on "MASH." But the most touching moment was Sheeler's presentation, which focused on the Iraq War and his devotion to covering the war's toll on the homefront.

"We all need to have an emotional attachment to the war, to know the country's at war," he said. He said he feels strongly that the reality of death in Iraq seldom intrudes on our daily life - either because the government suppresses it or the media chooses not to show it.

Many of the attendees felt stories of the dead soldiers are riddled with cliches, full of predictable and anodyne comments about bravery, heroism, leadership. Sheeler often spends hours with families, perhaps at the end asking to see or touch a beloved object of a fallen soldier. This is a way of finding a humanizing touch amid the pomp of burial, such as the soldier who slept with a baby blanket so his unborn child would know his scent when he was away on duty.

My own talk was adapted from a recently published magazine article about the craft and history of writing advance obituaries.