We call it “the accidents of history”: from archive to stock crash
Nice to see these sequentially in Martin Stabe’s RSS feed:
from the Official Google Blog, September 8:
“Today, we’re launching an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.”
Next (more recent) item in the feed: FT.com: United shares plunge on old news story:
“A six-year-old Chicago Tribune story on United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing, spotted on a Google search on Monday morning by an investment newsletter, triggered a massive sell-off of the carrier’s shares until trading was halted. … Google said a link to the story appeared on Sunday on a [South Florida Sun-Sentinel] web page listing the business section’s most viewed stories, but without any dateline referring to 2002. “
Discuss in the light of the prediction that you’ll have no subeditors in five years (sooner obviously if you’re at Express Newspapers)…
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- It would be nice if the press release didn't contradict itself within two paragraphs (6 November 2008; score: 36.55%)
- The moving finger writes, and having writ, it's stored permanently on RAID (22 October 2008; score: 35.97%)
- What if Bill Gates had died in that car crash? (I dunno, any car crash) (10 October 2005; score: 34.75%)
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September 16th, 2008 at 11:55 am
I’m not sure subs could have stopped the chain of events that led to the (fascinating) United Airlines sell-off story.
Rich Gordon has a great summary of how technical and human error that came together to cause this.
Apparently a single user opening that story at a very low-use time pushed the story (from a sister paper, no less) out of the archive and onto the front-page most-read list. From there it was picked up by Google News, which (allegedly) added an incorrect current timestamp because (allegedly) no date appeared on the archived story. From there it was up by a human-edited service that feeds into Bloomberg. It’s probably only at this last step where a sub could have stopped the chain of events.