MarcO Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 CNN Chagrined Over Premature Obits NEW YORK, April 17, 2003 CNN blamed human error Thursday for exposing obituary mock-ups that its Web site's designers had prepared for Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope and other prominent figures. The mock-ups had been on a development site meant for internal review. But the public briefly had access to them after the password protection got disabled. CNN was investigating the cause of the error, which was discovered and fixed Wednesday. CNN spokeswoman Edna Johnson said technicians were trying to determine how long the mock-ups had been exposed through the development site, which was not directly accessible from the main CNN.com news site. Although the mock-ups — essentially templates that were to be used when a subject dies — were no longer accessible to the public, the search engine Google still had a reference Thursday to Reagan's, titled "Ronald Reagan Remembered." Another Web site, The Smoking Gun, also had copies of mock-ups for Reagan, Hope, Fidel Castro, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Gerald Ford and Dick Cheney. News organizations, including The Associated Press, routinely prepare obituaries on prominent figures so stories can be run quickly when they die. In 1998, miscoding caused one such article, for Hope, to be inadvertently displayed on the AP's Web site, prompting a congressman to erroneously announce his death on the floor of the House of Representatives. The story did not say Hope had died, but the headline did. The CNN mock-ups do not actually say that the subject had died, although they had a placeholder for the year of death, as in "1941-2001" for Cheney. The write-ups also referred to subjects in the past tense. CNN said only the front page for the mock-ups had been available, with links to biographies and other features inactive. © MMIII The Associated Press. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paisley Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 ah, the wild wild web the joys of publishing things by accident Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hux Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paisley Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 that Cheney one does look sweet huh? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hux Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 1st two, I start to tear up....then it gets bad... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weezy Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarcO Posted April 18, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 Fucking classic! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
reba Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 brilliant!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 Weezy, you are a definitely a Jedi............ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zimmerman pt3 Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 LOL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paisley Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 no wonder Bush doesn't want to visit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hux Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 did you make that dude...?? wow, f'in hilare-is! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arcane Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 Just goes to show that everyone wants to be part of the Dead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weezy Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 yeah, thanks. I found myself with nothing else to do this morning - it was begging to be photoshopped. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tungsten Gruvsten Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 I dub thee sir Weezy an honourary Farker....submit that shit!! http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=501572 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weezy Posted April 18, 2003 Report Share Posted April 18, 2003 holy shit! cosmic. I dunno - they're all Americans - they'd probably get offended and call me a cheese-eating Canadian surrender monkey or something... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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