CMS glitch causes premature publication of Jobs' Obit

Ron Miller — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:09:27 -0400

Bloomberg, the financial news service, mistakenly published Apple CEO Steve Jobs' obituary last week, causing great embarrassment for the company. It likely happened when a staffer assigned to update the obit, clicked 'Save and Publish' instead of simply clicking 'Save.' This highly visible content management glitch highlights the need to put safeguards in place in your CMS to protect your staff from themselves.

Since we don't have access to the Bloomberg CMS, it's hard to know exactly what happened, but one thing is certain: the employee was assigned to update Jobs' obit, a common practice by major publications for famous individuals. There has been a lot of press lately regarding Jobs' health, and perhaps the publication thought it would be prudent to make sure the obituary was current. The person updating the story obviously had the right to publish directly to the site, a practice that Bloomberg may want to revisit. Meanwhile Jobs got to see his obituary, and learned that it wasn't all that flattering.

While Jobs may want to use this as a life lesson (a la, "A Christmas Carol"), Bloomberg may want to take the opportunity to analyze its workflow. When designing your CMS, you have to walk a fine line between not having it get in the way of employees doing their job and providing checkpoints to ensure mistakes like this one don't happen. While you can put gates in place, employees may still blow through them, but it's still worth the effort to ensure highly visible mistakes like this one don't come back to haunt your organization.

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