Web CMS could be to blame in UAL stock plunge story

The web was abuzz this week with news about how a Chicago Tribune story from 2002 was released as current news and caused the price of UAL stock to go tumbling. My immediate thought was that this was a web CMS glitch. Somehow, somebody released a story with the wrong date, which then was picked up by Google News and the financial wires services, and then took on a life of its own as can only happen on the wild, wild web. In fact, my colleague Tony Byrne who runs the respected CMS Watch initially thought the same thing [1], but then back-tracked in a later post, blaming the Google News Bot instead. I'm not ready to be so forgiving. You still have to ask why the story was posted in the first place and why it didn't have a clear date line.

Rule No. 1 for organizations placing content on a website is to display a clear date so readers can see how current it is. The web CMS should do that as a matter of course. Google sent out a crawler as it always does, and apparently it simply picked up the story in a "current news" section of the Florida Sun Sentinel. According to Google, the crawler, which is programmed to check for a date, only found a current one and picked up the story. We may never know how or why it was served up on the CMS in the first place, but one thing is certain: it certainly caused a large ruckus and had a very real effect on UAL's stock prices (at least for the short term). There are probably lessons aplenty here for everyone, but for folks who are designing or running your web CMS; for goodness sakes, post a date.

For more:
- check out this eWeek article [2]
- read this blog [3] from Duo Consulting
- read this New York Times blog [4]