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Flying the Not-so-friendly Wires

posted by Dan Skinner
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

If you thought sending out a press release with a typo was bad, imagine creating a financial panic at the world’s second-largest airline by erroneously sending a six-year old news story out on the wires. The series of events that lead to a 75 percent drop in United Airlines’ stock Monday underscore how critical it is for news services and wires to independently verify information that they send to subscribers. In this instance, Bloomberg received a six-year old story from reading service Income Securities regarding United Airlines filing for Chapter 11. Neither Bloomberg nor Income Securities independently verified the story’s timeliness after it was apparently miscoded by a Google News bot.

The Tribune Company (the source of the original story), Google, Income Securities and Bloomberg all had a hand in this and the investigation into who is most at fault is ongoing. The end result could be increased checks and procedures when wires send out critical financial information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Finance . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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