Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Joni Mitchell death hoax - Did I do that?





When I wrote this piece, it was late at night.  Initially, there was very little information about Joni’s condition.  Just that she had been rushed to the hospital unconscious.
I was literally in bed when I read that, I jumped up, and fired up the blog!
In order to be first to the story, my initial piece was titled ‘Joni Mitchell passes away’.  I wrote it as a draft in the Blogger application.  Google, as you may know, owns Blogger.  This becomes pertinent in a moment.

As I was writing, I was desperate for information.  I news googled ‘joni mitchell’ in every combination of ‘health, sick, dies’ etc etc.  I came across a headline that said “Joni Mitchell passes away”.  FUCK, I thought.  That sucks.  Oh well, at least I will have a timely Joni Mitchell piece for when the world wakes up to the bad news.  I clicked on the link for details.  It was my own damn article.  Apparently, it slipped out of draft status and into ‘publish’ status.  I felt dumb, and bad.  I immediately went back and deleted the article all together.  Google had indexed my headline from my silly little blog and had it as a national headline in about 20 minutes.

If you were up at 3 am that evening, and this includes you, Joni… I would just like to say I am sorry that I accidentally killed Joni Mitchell on the internet.  Proof you can’t believe everything you read.

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