Two years ago, The New York Times (NYT) posted its first video obituary known as ‘The Last Word.’ The subject, humorist and columnist Art Buchwald, had recorded an interview to be used at the time of his death.

“Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died,” the online presentation began. It went on to offer Buchwald’s last views on his life, and death, in a groundbreaking online approach.

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I have nothing but deep collegial empathy for the folks at the Bloomberg financial newswire after they accidentally let their pre-prepared Steve Jobs obituary slip momentarily onto the Web yesterday. The sophisticated publishing systems used in newsrooms today have many advantages, but they can also disrupt the old-fashioned, linear workflow with its series of checkpoints and enable more people along the line to accidentally and instantly publish a file before its time, leading to its equally instant dissemination across the Net. Add in the need for news organizations to stand ready with quick responses to scheduled, foreseeable or, in the case of obituaries, inevitable events, and you can expect to see A-matter leaking out on a semi-regular basis.

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One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. …” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

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