Byrne Tony Byrne

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No longer blaming the CMS for United's stock plunge

8-Sep-2008

Tags: Enterprise Search, Web Content and Experience Management, Vignette - OpenText

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...

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