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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