Legacy MattersNo news organization ever wants to do this. It was a monumental embarrassment when Reuters published the obituary of Steve Jobs who is still quite alive.
The stock obituary was published "momentarily" after a routine update by a reporter, and was "immediately deleted", Bloomberg said.
Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, but there is no suggestion that the news wire has recent news on his health. Most media organisations regularly update their pre-prepared obituaries of newsworthy figures.
The obituary contained blank spaces for Jobs’s age and cause of death to be inserted.
The opening sentence described Jobs as the man who “helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music and refashioned the mobile phone.”
As Mark Twain remarked when something similar happened to him, "The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.?