Beating a dead horse here, but I am very happy with the results of my testing. So I am now including the newspaper or Web site information for my Obituary fact in both the Description field and at the beginning of the Note field. I avoid duplicating the data in printed reports by removing the [Desc] variable from the sentence template for the Obituary fact.
The advantages are that I can still use the Description field of the Obituary fact to help manage obituaries as I described previously, and I can now use FamilySearch Central in RM to transfer the obituaries to FamilySearch as notes. I decided to leave the italics tags in the Obituary note, and the italics tags will just have to be included in the text that is transferred to FamilySearch.