Bloomberg's accidental premature publication of Steve Jobs' obituary makes me wonder: Are obituaries obsolete? Journalistic writing is basically episodic.

In 1993, I made the Minneapolis Star Tribune one of the world's first newspapers with an Internet connection. The goal wasn't to publish online. It was to facilitate reporting online, especially reporting that might involve collaboration with others. I knew how powerful such a simple tool as email could be.

Deborah Potter describes how CBS News called upon its affiliates to collaborate on a story on gas pump ripoffs:

I wrote to someone just the other day that "I have a problem with the term 'multimedia.'" Just as I have a problem with "citizen journalism." Now I see that the Press Gazette reports that the Press Association (UK) is phasing out "multimedia:"

EatSleepPublish muses about why so many print and online newsrooms don't get along:

"It turns out that one of the best ways to get people to hate each other is to:

• Put them in regular contact with each other
• Make it a competitive environment (split them into teams)

That’s it. The rest will magically take care of itself."

For the last couple of weeks I've been too busy to blog much. We're working to build the next-generation newspaper website management system. We have an October deadline, which seems a long way off, but it's not. There's a lot of work to do, including complete site redesigns. We're doing this simultaneously for two newspapers that are 1,200 miles apart, and the closest is almost five hours away from our office. And I'm going to India for two weeks in September. I want to see it largely completed before I drop off the grid.I've been through many content management system implementations.

One of the Web developers at work made the mistake the other day of asking how old I am, which led me to say I'm old enough to have worked in a world where newspapers set type with molten lead. Giant cauldrons of molten lead!

Tonight I ran across this wonderfully detailed image of a Mergenthaler Linotype, circa 1965, on Wikipedia (copyright Deutschen Museum, Munich):

Mark Potts thinks about the day when a major American city sees the end of its sole remaining metro daily newspaper: