Written By Rick Ellis, Wednesday, April 16th, 2003

It's common for news organizations to put together mock obituaries in anticipation of the death of very prominent people. It's also increasingly common for intrepid web surfers to uncover web sites that were intended for the internal, nonpublic use of the authors. On Wednesday, those two trends converged in yet another embarrassing public snafu from CNN.

At about 3pm ET, Fark.com linked to an internal CNN.com URL, which was apparently created for use by one or more of the web sites developers. It included mock obits of a number of well-known (and elderly) public figures, including Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, the Pope and Bob Hope.

Part of the sandbox.cnn.com URL was devoted to one Peter Rentz, who is apparently responsible for much of the content left open to the public.

It's unclear just how long the site has been publicly accessible, although this link shows that it was available as far back as August 2002. As the weblog entry shows, CNN developer Peter Rentz realized that this weblog was linking to his sandbox.cnn.com/prentz URL, and he initially asked that the link be removed. "i thought it was password protected from the outside but i guess not," he explains in an excerpt from an email he sent to the weblog's owner. "It probably would be a good idea to take the link down since a bit of that stuff is confidential. Or not."

But on August 19th, 2002 (three days later), another email excerpt from Rentz appears on the weblog, explaining that it's probably okay to keep the link available. "keep the link up. probably not a big deal."

At this point, no one from CNN is willing to discuss the matter, and emails sent to Mr. Rentz have went unanswered. Not surprisingly, I suspect everyone involved just wishes the story will go away.

Ultimately, this is all more embarrassing for Mr. Rentz than anyone else, although it comes on the heels of a really bad week at CNN. Images that visitors were able to capture of the site before it was pulled down are certain to be passed around from weblog to weblog for weeks. And sarcastic comments from the Fox News Channel are certain to follow.

In fact, it only took a few hours for the first inaccurate characterization of the site to hit the conservative press. Newsmax.com's headline "CNN Publishes Obits Of Reagan, Cheney," implies that the pieces were accidentally "published" by CNN. Instead of the less-inflamatory truth--which is that they were simply rough work pages left open to the public.

Ah, the joys of publishing on the Internet.