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H-e-e-e-e-e-ere’s Johnny!

By David Topping

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Screengrabs from the Globe‘s site, at just before 10 a.m. today.

Ed McMahon passed away earlier today; an article about his life, by Lynn Elber of the Associated Press, opens by describing McMahon as “the loyal Tonight Show sidekick who bolstered boss Johnny Carson with guffaws and a resounding ‘H-e-e-e-e-e-ere’s Johnny’ for 30 years,” and currently stands as the most-viewed new article on the Globe and Mail‘s website. The third most-viewed item? The Globe‘s obituary for Johnny Carson, written by their own John Doyle, published this morning and dated Tuesday, June 23, 2009, 09:03AM EDT—even though Johnny Carson died four and a half years ago.
Though commenters on the Carson obituary were a little confused (“Fuzzy Dunlop” wrote that “You got the wrong one”), neither obituary actually appeared in print, and the error’s more innocent than egregious: according to the Globe‘s Brodie Fenlon (whose Twitter we got pointed to by Bill Doskoch’s blog), the Carson obituary is “an archived story attached as a related item to [the] main [McMahon obituary], but [a] glitch gave today’s date.” The Globe has since changed the title of the article from “Johnny Carson dies at 79″ to “From our 2005 archives: Johnny Carson dies at 79,” and changed the dateline below Doyle’s name to “Originally published January 24, 2005.” (Thanks to reader John Perry, who tipped us off this morning, we snagged screenshots of the whole article before it was changed.) To be sure, today’s a sad day for Tonight Show fans; it’s just not doubly sad.

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  • http://undefined mathewi

    Good catch, David. Yes, we re-posted an archived piece on Johnny Carson’s death so we could add it as a related story to the McMahon piece, but because we republished it the system gave it today’s date. Of course, Google and Twitter are so fast that by the time we corrected the headline and date it had already been picked up and redistributed in a number of places. Just another lesson in how we all have to learn to move faster :-)

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    In accordance with Muphry’s Law, I made a small typo on Bill Doskoch’s name: I called him Bill Doskock. Whoops.