29 August, 2008

Obituaries in store

It is of no surprise that newsmakers prepare the obituaries ahead of time. Two days ago the Bloomberg financial newswire accidentally published one for Steve Jobs, a CEO of Apple corp. The obituary was retracted after a while, but not fast enough, so it was copied by gawker.com, and published there. The most interesting part are comments for Bloomberg reporters and lists of contact persons, who probably can give interviews in case of Jobs' death.

A similar case was recently described by Tatiana Tolstaya: ten years ago living in the US, she received a call from The New York Times with an offer to write an obituary to Solzhenitsyn. She said "no". Now, when Solzhenitsyn have died, we know who agreed to do this - Michael T. Kaufman.

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