Steve Jobs had a unique kind of fame. The Apple co-founder saw his role as bridging the disciplines of art and technology, and his appeal -- his cult -- likewise cut across established categories. Just try to think of another public figure who could ever have appeared on the covers of Time, People and Businessweek simultaneously -- and on the cover of Rolling Stone in the same month to boot.
Jobs and his enigmatic half-smile were seemingly everywhere you looked in the days following his death from pancreatic cancer one year ago. More than 10% of the news coverage in print and on TV and radio during the week of Oct. 3 through Oct. 9 of 2012 was devoted to the company he built, Apple, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Most of that was devoted to obituaries and other articles about his death and life. (The launch of the iPhone 4S, which took place a few days earlier, also accounted for some of it.)
The only topics that got more coverage during that week were the economy -- including the Occupy movement, which was then making headlines across America -- and the presidential election. And even the election took a backseat in the hours immediately following confirmation of Jobs's passing, as Sarah Palin discovered when her announcement that she'd decided against running was greeted by silence.
His death was even bigger news on Twitter, where it was the week's most-discussed event. At 8 p.m., as most Twitter users were just hearing about it, the network lit up with more than 6,000 tweets per second, one of the highest activity rates ever.
Even the slowest of media cycles sped up in response to the surge of interest in all things Jobs. Simon & Schuster moved up the publication date of "Steve Jobs," the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, by a month after pre-orders pushed it to No. 1 on Amazon.com. The book went on to sell more than 2.2 million copies and is now being adapted into a film by Aaron Sorkin.
In addition to the magazines mentioned above, Newsweek and The Economist also put Jobs on their covers. Like Businessweek, Newsweek published an advertising-free tribute issue, while Time, which was hours away from completing production of its regularly-scheduled issue when the news broke, literally stopped its presses in order to ad 21 pages of Jobs-themed editorial and a new cover. (Click the gallery above for a sampling of magazine covers and newspaper front pages.)
One of the subtlest and rarest tributes came from Google. While it often commemorates inventors' birthdays with variations of its "Google doodle," in this case it went with a subtle call-out on its home page: a line of text reading "Steve Jobs: 1955-2011."
