John C Abell
Business

Steve Jobs is Not -- Repeat, Not -- Dead

We’re not in the habit of piling on the gaffes of other media, but since we’ve done a fair amount of our own reporting on the health of Steve Jobs, we feel duty bound to share this gawker story about Bloomberg somehow publishing its work-in-progress obituary of the Apple CEO. The Bloomberg financial newswire decided […]

Steviej
We're not in the habit of piling on the gaffes of other media, but since we've done a fair amount of our own reporting on the health of Steve Jobs, we feel duty bound to share this gawker story about Bloomberg somehow publishing its work-in-progress obituary of the Apple CEO.

The Bloomberg financial newswire decided to update its 17-page Steve Jobs obituary today – and inadvertently published it in the process. Some investors were undoubtedly rattled to see, as our tipster did late this afternoon, the Apple CEO's obit cross the wire and then suddenly disappear.

As morbid as it may sound, obituaries are, of course, written way in advance whenever possible, especially when the subject is getting on in years or health issues emerge. Subjects are often happily interviewed for their own media epitaphs (perhaps not the media-averse Jobs).

For the record, Gawker notes that a) Bloomberg doesn't seem to have any new information about the state of Jobs' health and, b) "Bloomberg doesn't seem to have many people's cellphone numbers."

Gawker did publish a screen grab of the obit in its entirety, excerpted here because a) we guarantee you will never see this lede again on Bloomberg and, b) we don't think our lawyers would want us to print the original in its entirety:

Obit

Naturally, headlines about the error are better than the one on the "story" could ever possibly be. Here are our five favorites so far:

Very Emily Litella

Monty Python lives

Channeling Mark Twain

This just in! Sorry – what's that again?

Hmmm ... sounds like someone needs a good lawyer, pronto.

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