TrendWatch Blog
No longer blaming the CMS for United's stock plunge
08-Sep-2008
Update: turns out I was too quick to blame the CMS.
Here's what seems to have happened: the Florida
Sun-Sentinel website re-ran a 6-year old story from the archive of
fellow Times-Mirror chain property Chicago Tribune about UA emerging
from its then bankruptcy, but somehow the date got changed to today. [Update at 6:45 ET: turns out an investment firm picked up a fresh entry in Google for an old archive page and pushed it to Bloomberg as news.] Bloomberg
wire services picked up the "news," it spread like wildfire, and UA
stock fell 75% before the Tribune and Sun Times figured out what happened
and pulled the story. The Sun-Sentinel and the Tribune evidently
share a CMS (which
at one time some many years back was Vignette, but appears to be a bespoke
platform now).
A Sun-Sentinel exec says that a review of their system shows "no one at the paper" touched the file since 2003. Turns out that makes sense.
Before I get snarky about this episode, I'll confess that I've accidentally changed dates on older articles on this site, causing them pop innocently back into our RSS feed (and Google), with puzzled reactions from many readers.
In this case, though, it appears that Google -- as it is wont to do -- just got around to indexing some old content. Lesson #1, for you, be careful what Google calls news.
Lesson #2 for me, wait for more facts to emerge before blogging about breaking events...
- Submitted by: Tony Byrne, Analyst
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