The swift, sharp and short-lived collapse of United Airlines shares Sept. 8 has been followed by a week of finger-pointing.
Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United's parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Co., the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.
The stock plunge was instigated by a series of cascading human and machine errors, and it raised new questions about the reliability of automated news services like Google News and the struggles of some traditional media companies to adapt to the Internet age.
Analysts of new media say there is plenty of blame to go around. They say the problem had its roots in the still-clumsy dance between the Web sites of traditional news outlets and the search engines whose attention they covet. The initial error was then amplified by a researcher at a financial information service who had failed to verify information retrieved from the buyer-beware world of the Web.
"This is what happens when everything goes on autopilot and there are no human controls in place or those controls fail," said Scott Moore, who as head of Yahoo media oversees Yahoo News, the most popular news site on the Web.
The problem began Sept. 7, shortly after midnight, when a link to an article headlined "United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy," which had originally been published in The Chicago Tribune in 2002, appeared in the "Most Viewed" box on the main business page of The Sun-Sentinel's site.
Within a minute, the automated scanning system of Google News, which visits more than 7,500 news sites every 15 minutes or so in search of new...

More... (http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=61896)