Dated link nearly sinks airline

A dated news link sent United stock into a tailspin

The re-emergence of a six year-old news story is causing major headaches for United Airlines.

Stock in the airline dropped by some 75 per cent earlier this week when a story from 2002 about the company's bankruptcy filing was erroneously reported as breaking news, triggering a market panic.

The report was traced back to the Sun Sentinel, a Florida newspaper owned by the Tribune Company.

On 10 December 2002 the paper wrote an article about United's bankruptcy filing and subsequent efforts to re-emerge.

According to the paper, a spike in traffic caused the story to be listed among its most read current business articles. From there, the page was indexed by a Google News crawler which then reposted the story.

The article was subsequently picked up by other news services, causing a momentary panic before the situation was sorted out.

While both Google and the Tribune Company agree on the general order of events which led to the posting, neither side would accept full responsibility.

"The only date found in the context of the article indicated that the article was from September 7 2008," Google said in a blog posting.

"Because the Sun Sentinel included a link to the story in its 'Popular Stories' section, and provided a date on the article page of September 7 2008, the Google News algorithm indexed it as a new story."

The Tribune Company said in a statement that those reposting the story were at fault, and that the true date of the story should have been readily apparent.

"As we said yesterday, the December 10 2002 story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002," t he company said.

"It appears that no-one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself."

The explanations may not be nearly enough for United, however. The airline issued a statement of its own demanding a retraction from the paper. United has also said that it is investigating the matter further.