The Art of the News Obit

When they're at their best, nobody does a better news obituary than The New York Times.
(When they're at their worst, they're dang boring, but that's a post for another day.)
The news obituary is a fine art: It should be comprehensive yet compact, objective, even critical, but still respectful and providing a sense of closure.
The NYT did a fine, fine job this week on the news obit of Pope John Paul II. Perhaps you could argue that it does not fulfill my criteria of compactness -- it is quite long -- but it is interesting and comprehensive. I read it Sunday afternoon, not on the Internet, but in the newspaper itself, and it was pleasant reading.
Read the entire obit here.
In this excerpt, the writer Robert D. McFadden describes the assassination attempt on the Pope's life. Notice how he neatly summarizes the investigation that concludes years later:

John Paul's life as a robust, traveling teacher-pope appeared to have been altered on May 13, 1981, when a 23-year-old Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, shot him as he rode in an open car before 10,000 people in St. Peter's Square. Bystanders seized the gunman as the pope's car sped away to Gemelli Hospital. Shot in the abdomen, right arm and left hand, he underwent five hours of surgery, and part of an intestine was removed.

Investigators searching Mr. Agca's past learned that he was a murderer who had escaped from a Turkish prison in 1979 and had ties to a neo-Nazi group, the Gray Wolves. But no evidence of a conspiracy to kill the pope was found. Mr. Agca was tried by the Italian authorities and sentenced to life in prison.

The assailant later said the shooting was a Soviet-inspired plot involving Bulgarian and Turkish agents, and investigators uncovered tantalizing details that seemed to support some of his assertions. But an Italian court in 1986 found the evidence ambiguous and acquitted three Bulgarians and three Turks of conspiracy in the case. A link between the attack and the Bulgarian government was often asserted, but never proved.