The recent question about your writing process makes me curious: do you pre-plan any posts? For example, I think today is the day Jimmy Carter passes John Nance Garner as longest-living president or vice president...do you have something ready to go? Similarly, I know major news outlets have their coverage of major figures' passing mostly queued up and ready to go -- did you have a similar process for your posting around George HW Bush's death (and, given that President Carter is on hospice, of course, is that something you're working on now?)
Good question!
There was a fascinating story related to your question in the New York Times after Fidel Castro died in 2016 about how Fidel's obituary had been written in advance and just edited with new information or pertinent facts for decades. When he actually died, they were able to make some tweaks and add specific information to the advance obit that over a dozen journalists had worked on over the years. The first draft of Fidel's NYT obituary was written in 1959 when Castro led the Cuban Revolution and the Times just kept working on it for nearly 60 years. When he did die, they were able to quickly publish an in-depth obit that was like 8,000 words long. And, as you said, most major news organizations have advance obituaries ready for leading figures, so that they can move quickly when something finally happens.
(Saturday Night Live even had a famous sketch about preparing advance obituaries where Tom Brokaw (Dana Carvey) was taping numerous reports about Gerald Ford dying in increasingly ridiculous ways.)
Anyway, to answer your question, I do not usually write anything in advance to be published when something specific happens. There have been a few occasions where I've worked on several different pieces to publish on the anniversary of certain historic events. For example, I kind of did that last month for the 100th anniversary of Warren G. Harding's death. But even in that case, I wrote most of the stuff as I posted it and the things I had ready to post ahead of time were mainly the contemporary photographs or the screenshots of newspaper headlines that I had ready to go in my Drafts so I could easily post them.
I think the only time I wrote a significant amount of content ahead of time to publish on a specific date was on November 22, 2013, which was the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. I wrote several longform essays (this was when I still knew how to write!) about the Kennedy Assassination that I published on that day because I knew that there would be even more people interested in the subject than usual on that specific day and wanted to be sure I took advantage of it.
But, other than that, I'm usually just writing stuff as I go along.
