Steve Jobs death notice: Oh, really?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is not dead. And Bloomberg News needs an obit blog. Really.

Yesterday, financial news service Bloomberg was updating its obituary on Jobs when someone hit the wrong button and the 17-page text of the obit went out over the wire.

You can see the whole thing in a post at Gawker, but it's not likely that anyone who saw it thought Jobs was really dead. At least not anyone who actually read the beginning of the text, which is headlined "Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Arbiter of Cool Technology, XXXX" and continues: "DATE (Bloomberg) -- Steve Jobs, 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, has XXXX. He was TK. Jobs XXXX, TK said XXXXX."

TK is standard newspaper jargon for "to come." XXXX is a placeholder for more information. That made it pretty obvious that something wasn't ready for publication.

Bloomberg pulled the obit off the wire as soon as it was discovered and issued a bland retraction: "An incomplete story referencing AppleInc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m. New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted."

Yeah, all the usual lessons apply about how easily information can leak out accidentally. Also the conventional ruminations about how mainstream media can stumble in the age of the Interwebs. And likewise the standard blahblahblah about how secretive Jobs is about his health and what that means for Apple's succession planning (in this case, "secretive" means Jobs won't hand over his medical records to every reporter who thinks he looks a bit peaked).

But what's a lot more interesting to me is what the obit actually claims about Jobs, starting with the statement that he "helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones." Really? I can walk up to a computer, pick up one piece of it in my hand and punch exactly seven buttons, and it will fully fulfill its operating function? Um, no.

And then there's the absence in the obit of Mike Markkula, the ex-Intel exec who actually turned Apple from a garage operation into a real company, and helped guide it for decades afterwards. Now there's a guy who's truly secretive; the Bloomberg obit writer barely knows he exists.

There are likely many more problems with the obit, but I'm sure the folks at Bloomberg will get lots of useful feedback on it. And who knows? Maybe this could start a trend. Leaking every obit in advance might make it a lot easier to get the details right.

Better still, Bloomberg could do it right and create a proper obit blog. Yeah, that would let the rest of the world see Bloomberg's finely crafted death notices in advance, and lazy reporters would probably crib from them.

But creating an obit blog for the Wikipedia types to crowdsource might actually provide useful information and remove some of the dumber elements before somebody dies at age TK and the deadline crush is on (all subject to real obit writers checking the facts, naturally).

It couldn't be worse than accidentally sending out a 17-page pile of XXXX.