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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

On the night of Steve Jobs's death I stopped by the Fifth Avenue cube just to see what the mood was like (it was pretty much normal with a small crowd outside and some flowers) and I ran into a former colleague who now is a reporter at Businessweek. She told me that this week's issue was literally ready to go to press and then the news of Jobs's death broke, so they threw it out and she was there at 11PM getting customer comment on the event, and everyone else was putting in another 12 hour shift to re-create the issue (of course, some of the content had already been assembled in the event of Jobs's passing).

Great to see that their hustle and hardwork paid off. It's an entirely different thing to redo a weekly magazine the night of publication than it is a newspaper or website.

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Not to discount Businessweek's release, but the reality is that media organizations devote enormous amounts of time to prepare for the imminent death of a popular/famous figure. I'd bet that weeks of effort were put into what consists of Businessweek's release on Jobs' death while Steve was alive. What they produced doesn't come together in a couple days.

Remember the Bloomberg accidental 17 page obituary release for Steve Jobs in 2007?

Don't discount the media's efforts when being the first with the "extensive article" on the death and past history of someone important puts you first out of the gate.

Agreed. It's a bit naive to think they assembled this at the last minute.

With that said, having a whole issue dedicated to someone in this manner (photos, quotes, no ads) is still pretty awesome.

It’s perfectly alright to believe that they assembled this in the last minute. It’s a bit naive to believe that they created all the content in the last minute. (Some of the content, however, most certainly had to be created in the last minute.)

I didn't say they hadn't prepared. Every major news publication has had an obit prepared. But Businessweek had to tear out their current cover article and others, and do layout and pagination among other traditional publishing tasks unrelated to content gathering. The fact that my former colleague was out gathering reaction also shows that some work has to be done to make the content up to date

...and why couldn't all of that have been prepared in advance? I find it somewhat disturbing to have already prepared an obituary, but how do we know that there isn't a pile of similarly, very well produced and finished magazines waiting to go the press of other famous business figures?

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