Wednesday, April 24, 2002

 

I don't understand what the big deal is. Apparently some web surfers found Ronald Reagan's obituary at the Scripps Howard News Service site. Now it seems some people are outraged that the obituary is already written. Duh. Wake up people. I can guarantee that not only is Reagan's obituary written but George W. Bush's, his father's, Jimmy Carter's, Bill Clinton's, Gerald Ford's, Walter Mondale's, Al Gore's, Tom Cruise's, Denzel Washington's, Katharine Hepburn's, Bob Hope's, Oprah Winfrey's etc., etc. etc. That's the way news services operate. Are people naive enough to think news services wait until someone dies before writing an obit? I remember a couple of weeks before Jimmy Stewart died. The Associated Press was running some kind of test and sent Stewart's obit to every one of its member newspapers in Pennsylvania. But, they didn't send an advisory first letting editors know it was a test. There was just write-through after write-through of the obit for over an hour. Finally, someone at the AP realized what was going on and sent an advisory. I'm not sure if any newspapers actually ran with the premature obit or not. Anyway, the reason they did the test was that they were afraid Stewart would die over 4th of July weekend when newspaper staff levels are low. They wanted to make sure everything was set just in case because Stewart was a Pennsylvania native and his death was going to be big news, especially in western Pennsylvania. Sure enough, Stewart died July 2.

My point (and I do have one) is that people shouldn't be outraged that Regan's obit is written already. Scripps Howard should be outraged that there was a breach of security at their site and that anyone had access to news that wasn't ready to be printed yet.

posted by Anne 4/24/2002 09:45:00 AM