More likely, they had this issue prepared ahead of time. They, like most observers, knew it was coming. No ads simplifies the logistics of swapping out the issue.
All news organisations prepare obituaries and related content for famous figures in advance.
There's a classic piece of BBC lore about this, the story goes that the reason BBC staff are now no longer allowed to browse the library of preprepared obituary pieces is because Margaret Thatcher's tape was getting worn out from being watched and re-watched too many times.
There are certainly cases of obituaries that were published where the actual author of the obituary had themselves died several years earlier. I've also heard of journalists who update their own obituary every couple of years.
There's a story circulating about Time literally stopping the presses and creating a new issue in 3 hours. Wouldn't surprise me to learn this was done in similar fashion.
It's hard to appreciate the drama of deciding to stop that enormous thing, pulp the hundreds of thousands of papers already printed, and re-print everything from scratch, without understanding the scale of the operation.
Without a doubt prepared in advance - you'd be incompetent as a news org not to do so. It's still however a fantastically put together thing and to have no ads in there whatsoever is quite a dedication.
The Ipad issue which is gorgeous as well, actually has a video where they do confirm that they had a lot of the content already done before and they pulled in all-nighters as soon as they heard about his death to put it all together.
