Misdated Story Brings Down United’s Stock
September 9, 2008 3:01 PM | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
To quickly summarize what happened: Google News, an automatic news aggregator, found an undated article from South Florida Sun-Sentinel and assigned it a current date of September 8, 2008. The article was actually from 2002 and was about the bankruptcy of United Airlines. This "news" was picked up as a current story by Google News and then by an individual working as a "third party content provider" for Bloomberg. So this old story ended up being posted on the Bloomberg network as current news. The sequence of events culminated in massive stock sell-off, stock drop from $12 to $3, and even an explanation from Google News. (See the Washington Post story with a minute by minute coverage of the chain reaction)
There are many angles and questions in this happening that are interesting to point out:
- Top destinations do get a chunk of their content from third parties and obviously their standards do not often match that of the destination. Destinations should be aware how the content is being generated much like retail operations should be aware how its products are being manufactured. Also, often the differences and labels are unclear between in-house content, partner content, sponsored content, etc... This makes the situation even more complex.
- Google really has to work out the kinks in this technology. Today's announcement of "Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives" was quite untimely. Its alerts service already produces many false leads and backdated results so this technology problem should be fixed.
Social media marketers and digital PR experts have been saying that in this age one person can bring down a brand. Well, this was a close call....
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