It's no secret that the press likes to be ready for every eventuality — but part of that preparedness is knowing the difference between contingency and contretemps. That was a lesson learned rather painfully by Bloomberg News on Wednesday, after the media giant accidentally published still-living Apple-founder Steve Jobs' obituary.

The mishap apparently took place after a Bloomberg reporter updated the company's seventeen-page tribute to the "Arbiter of Cool Technology" — a practice routinely carried out by news agencies in order to provide quick information immediately postmortem. What most don't do, however, is publish the contents of their "just-in-case" file — we here at Breaking News are keeping a tight lid on ours — something Bloomberg might well do for the future. The extensive bio — obtained and reprinted by Gawker — is a veritable who's-who of technology over the past thirty years, and makes for a good read, provided you ignore the past tense. By all accounts, the fumble was just a glitch, and doesn't represent inside knowledge or details of Jobs' somewhat-delicate health.

No word from Bloomberg on just how the now-retracted obit managed "inadvertent" publication, but we're suspecting that somewhere at News HQ somebody is doing a remarkable impression of Mata Hari.

__________________________
Justin Ryan is News Editor for LinuxJournal.com.
Submit a tip: Email IRC