UAL story revived by clicks on paper's Web site
The outdated bankruptcy story that sparked a run on United Airlines shares Monday came back to life because it showed up on a newspaper Web site's "most viewed" section, where it was picked up by Google News and later seen by panicky stockholders, the newspaper's owner said on Tuesday.
United had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, but its shares dove on Monday when a link to an old story about the bankruptcy filing appeared on the South Florida Sun Sentinel's Web site. The newspaper's owner, Tribune Co., laid out its version of how that happened on Tuesday:
_ The 2002 United bankruptcy story in the paper's archive got enough Internet traffic early Sunday morning to push it into the "Popular Business Stories: Most Viewed" section of the paper's Web site. Tribune said the story was not republished, and the Internet link was simply a link to the archive version of the story.
_ Automated Google software noticed the new link a few minutes later and a link to the story went on Google News. Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started reading the story on the Sun Sentinel's Web site.
A Florida investment firm has said previously that it found the story on Monday morning with a Google search and posted a summary on the Bloomberg financial information service. That visibility _ Bloomberg is seen by thousands of investment managers and traders _ is what sparked the run on United shares.
Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman declined to say how much traffic it took to push the old United story onto the Sun Sentinel's list of most-viewed business stories.
"As you'd expect, the business page of the Sun Sentinel Web site doesn't get a lot of traffic in the middle of the night," he said. He said Web traffic to the story spiked Sunday and into Monday morning.
The investment newsletter that posted a summary of the story to Bloomberg, Income Securities Advisors Inc. in Miami Lakes, Fla., has said there was nothing on the Sun Sentinel Web site to indicate that the story was old. The story also coincidentally referred to United's bankruptcy filing as happening on Monday, the day the story was widely viewed. United had filed for bankruptcy protection on a Monday in December 2002.
The page also fooled Bloomberg. Although the summary of the old story was initially posted by the Florida investment newsletter, Bloomberg spokeswoman Judith Czelusniak said Bloomberg News staffers posted headlines noting first the UAL share price drop, and then, at 11:06 a.m. EDT, a bankruptcy denial from United. But a different Bloomberg News staffer working the story found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07 a.m., posted a headline "informing that the Chicago Tribune reported UAL files for bankruptcy," Czelusniak wrote in an e-mail. The 2002 story on the Sun Sentinel Web site had come from the Chicago Tribune.
The erroneous reports were corrected minutes later, but UAL shares traded as low as $3 before trading was halted...
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