How Steve Jobs’ obit got published
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?The first rule of publishing is that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. (A corollary favored at Time Magazine, where I labored for nearly three decades, is that all copy is guilty until proved otherwise.)
None of this excuses, but it does help explain, how Bloomberg News managed to publish an obituary on Wednesday afternoon of Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs, who is still quite alive.
Advance work on famous figures’ obits is nothing new, and given Jobs’ well-publicized brush with pancreatic cancer four years ago and recent concerns about his weight loss, it’s understandable that Bloomberg might choose this moment to update its piece on Jobs, although the version that got published contains no details about his health that weren’t already in the public record.
According to a Bloomberg spokesperson, however, it was a routine update of the kind regularly performed by the obit department.
The story — which ran under the byline Connie Guglielmo and the headline “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Arbitrator of Cool Technology, XXXX” (the X’s to be filled in with his age at death) — was marked “HOLD FOR RELEASE — DO NOT USE — HOLD FOR RELEASE — DO NOT USE.” But even that didn’t stop it from getting out. It should have been sent to Bloomberg’s internal wire, but instead it moved on the external wire that carried it to Bloomberg subscribers. The file was pulled within 30 seconds, according to Bloomberg PR, and the following retraction issued:
Story Referencing Apple Was Sent in Error by Bloomberg News
Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — An incomplete story referencing Apple
Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.
New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and
has been retracted.—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli
But another rule of publishing is that once the cat is out of the bag, you can rarely stuff her back in. And sure enough, a copy of the 17-page story, complete with notes and sources, fell into the hands of Gawker’s Ryan Tate, who gleefully posted what Bloomberg had hoped would be quickly forgotten.
- from CNN