How could that happen, may you ask ? Allow us to explain: journalists working for all media prepare obituaries of prominent people in advance with salient traits and events so as to be able to inform readers/listeners as quickly and thoroughly as possible, in the event of the person's passing.
Unfortunately late morning on Monday 16 November, about 100 obituaries were published on rfi.fr, as well as on partner platforms (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Flipboard…). This was purely accidental, due to a technical glitch linked to the migration of the RFI site to a new publishing tool. The obituaries were published as drafts outside of any editorial control.
All the articles published by mistake are in the process of being unpublished from our digital media and partner platforms.
The incident is being investigated.
RFI and France Médias Monde, our holding company, wish to apologise unreservedly to all the people concerned and those who may have been hurt by these obituaries which, we stress again, were published by mistake.
We also wish to offer our apologies to all of our readers.
