David Greising of the Chicago Tribune reports:
The stock, which had closed Friday at $12.30 a share, hit a low of $3 a share before the confusion was cleared up. The stock was trading recently at $8.97, down $3.03 for the day.
After being alerted to the issue Monday morning, the Chicago Tribune removed the story from its online archives which are also accessed by other Tribune Co. newspapers. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel's version of the story was the one that was cited by Bloomberg. The story did not appear on the Web site of the Chicago Tribune.
The original story, published Dec. 10, 2002, appeared the day after United Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and discussed the company's strategy for emerging from bankruptcy. Though the text of the story appeared on the Sun-Sentinel Web site Monday, the date on the story had been changed to Sep. 6, 2008, according to Joseph Schwerdt, deputy managing editor-interactive for the Sun-Sentinel.
United Airlines officials were obviously angry, and demanded a retraction. "United continues to execute its previously announced business plan to successfully navigate through an environment marked by volatile fuel prices and continues to have strong liquidity," United Airlines said in a statement.
The story was posted at 10:53 a.m. It is not clear how it made its way onto the web with a posting date of Sept. 6, 2008.
James Abels and Tom Van Riper of Forbes reported on the chaos in the newsroom caused by the botched posting:
Micheal Lev, business editor ot the Chicago Tribune, said his staff was scrambling to figure out what was going on with United's stock. He said at the time that he had not heard of the CNBC report that a six-year-old story about United filing for bankruptcy had run on the his paper's Web site. "We've written nothing on United Airlines today," said Lev.
According to news aggregation site SmartBrief.com, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune paper, was the first to run the old story about United. It was posted to its Web site at roughly 1 p.m. Sunday.
Sun-Sentinel Online Editor Joe Schwerdt pulled the story off his site shortly before noon this morning, in response to a call Tribune made to Sun-Sentinel editor Earl Maucker.
"I literally just got word a couple minutes ago that there was problem," says Schwerdt. He says he did not know how the old story was posted as new and was unsure if any other Tribune papers ran it. He declined to discuss details about how his paper publishes stories on weekends. ...
It was unclear whether the old story appeared on the front of the Tribune's site, as some initial reports indicated. Tribune says it did not. Regardless, investors who found the story would have a hard time knowing it was six years old. No date of original publication is listed on the story page on either chicagotribune.com or sunsentinel.com. The only date on the pages was today's: Sept. 8, 2008
On Romenesko's journalism blog, Maucker says reports that an United Airlines bankruptcy story resurfaced on his paper's website on Sunday are wrong. "We never posted the story. We never did anything." A research firm apparently found the old story through a Google search and then posted it to Bloomberg, which caused UAL investors to panic, Romenesko says.
Mary Schlangenstein of Bloomberg reports the news report was posted online by the Sun-Sentinel and was picked up by Income Securities Advisors Inc., said Richard Lehmann, president of the Miami Lakes, Florida-based research firm. Income Securities Advisors distributed the report on the Bloomberg terminal before retracting it and issuing a correction. Bloomberg News also ran a headline citing the Tribune story after the Income Securities Advisors report.
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