Today’s newspaper front pages and video reels have been ready to go for many, many years. Just don’t forget to fill the placeholder text. Plus: the RIP front pages of the UK newspapers.
Few things can be more confidently predicted than the arrival, at one point or another, of death. With that in mind, the cardboard files and digital folders of media outlets around the world include obituaries of countless people not yet dead. In answer to Mark Twain’s complaint, the job of the obits editor is very much to exaggerate the deaths of those still alive.
It is not uncommon for obituarists, indeed, to depart before their subjects. Following the death of the prolific London Evening Standard movie critic Alexander Walker in 2003, for example, obituaries under his byline continued for years, as film-makers followed him into the end credits.
Often, in the preparation of “advances” – obituaries drafted while the subject remains in the land of the living – the writer will call the person directly. Margalit Fox, a former obituary writer for the New York Times who features in the documentary Obit, described that task in this way:
There is no Emily Post for how you call someone up and say in effect, hello, I’m a stranger. You don’t know me but I’d like to ask you about some fairly revealing details of your life. And then when you die because I know you will sooner or later, I’m going to put them where a million people can see them.
The bigger the figure, the larger the file. When it’s the monarch of the United Kingdom and a bunch of Commonwealth realms, a woman who has reigned for an extraordinary 70 years and 214 days, and who has taken her leave after 96 years on earth, it’s a veritable filing cabinet of tribute. Just about every major magazine, newspaper, television station and news site, from Fleet Street to much of the Anglosphere and beyond, has had a special edition in the pie-warmer since – well, since before anyone who works there today can remember.
When I did some sub-editing shifts at the illustrious Radio Times magazine in London in 1999, on a quiet day when there wasn’t much else to do, I was tasked with some proof-reading on their tribute issue to Her Majesty, RIP. By then it had been around for decades already. The publications rolling off the presses at this moment are quite literally the fruits of more than half a century, words and pictures composed across two millenniums.
Inevitably – almost as inevitably as death and taxes – the volume of oven-ready news breaks, picture spreads, video tracks and heartfelt eulogies has resulted in the occasional premature lamentation, a hazard bloated by the vicissitudes of social media. In 2015, a BBC journalist, apparently borking a dress rehearsal, tweeted news that the Queen had died. In 2020, French public radio mistakenly published an obituary for the Queen, along with those for about 100 others. Earlier this year the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo declared on its website that Elizabeth had died “at the age of XX”.
When the moment does arrive, a similar danger lurks in the sudden sprint to publish pre-cooked copy before swapping out the placeholder text. The unfortunate exemplar of this today comes from the awkwardly named Hollywood news site Deadline, which included in its first report on the sad news lines such as “The queen had been (INSERT MORE INFO HERE ABOUT HER ILLNESS, HOW AND WHERE SHE DIED IF NECESSARY)” and “The Queen passed away at her home in Balmoral, Scotland at tktktk PM local time”.
In New Zealand, state broadcaster RNZ this morning flicked the switch to a special RIP Queen layout. The Stuff newspaper stable fired up the presses this morning to print a special supplement on the Queen, which they’re handing out in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland (on Queen Street, hopefully).
And, below, a selection of front pages from the UK – first editions decades in the planning.
