Actually they didn't: https://twitter.com/bizweekdesign/status/121871973688160256 and https://twitter.com/bizweekdesign/status/121918276459696129

All news organisations prepare obituaries and related content for famous figures in advance.

There's a classic piece of BBC lore about this, the story goes that the reason BBC staff are now no longer allowed to browse the library of preprepared obituary pieces is because Margaret Thatcher's tape was getting worn out from being watched and re-watched too many times.

I remember that joke from Drop the Dead Donkey.

There are certainly cases of obituaries that were published where the actual author of the obituary had themselves died several years earlier. I've also heard of journalists who update their own obituary every couple of years.

There's a story circulating about Time literally stopping the presses and creating a new issue in 3 hours. Wouldn't surprise me to learn this was done in similar fashion.

Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/06/apple_rivals_p...

That Time-stopping-the-presses thing seems oddly/inappropriately self promotional also.

Here's the printing press for the LA Times:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/many-la-times-...

It's hard to appreciate the drama of deciding to stop that enormous thing, pulp the hundreds of thousands of papers already printed, and re-print everything from scratch, without understanding the scale of the operation.

People had an issue about the Amanda Knox release in my supermarket less than 48 hours after the event. This happens a lot more often now.

Without a doubt prepared in advance - you'd be incompetent as a news org not to do so. It's still however a fantastically put together thing and to have no ads in there whatsoever is quite a dedication.

The Ipad issue which is gorgeous as well, actually has a video where they do confirm that they had a lot of the content already done before and they pulled in all-nighters as soon as they heard about his death to put it all together.

Most likely. Kind of like how WSJ spat out an obituary 19 minutes after Jobs' death.