When old news is new news

John Merli
Published: September 10, 2008

I can see it now. The end of civilization as we know it. (Not that that’s necessary a bad thing.) It will come in the form of an alarming news story that will instantaneously plunge the stock market into
suicidal chaos, alert the world’s great armies to suit up and start launching their missiles and place the world on a course of irreversible mass destruction. And there will be a lot of screaming.

But wait, that pesky news item that started it all will have turned out to have been wrong. By then, of course, it will be too late. There will be no one around to take heed of the mistake buried inside the
paper in the bottom left-hand corner under Corrections and Clarifications (as if there’s a difference) stating: “The announcement that the stock market has crashed, again, that Japan has bombed Pearl
Harbor, again, and that a Russian nuclear power plant was in meltdown, again — although true at one time — were all inadvertently re-reported from previous decades. We regret any inconvenience this
may have caused the tens of millions of innocent people who may have needlessly perished in recent days as a result of this Armageddon that has ensued.”

Although perhaps just a teeny bit less dramatic then my own artistically rendered scenario, you may have guessed about the real-world development that unfolded this week along these general lines of
mass confusion. A news item that told of United Airlines supposedly going bankrupt (again) very nearly destroyed all the company’s stock, as well as the company, for that matter. The item in question
this week was actually six years-old, when United actually did filed for Chapter 11 to cut costs. Somehow the old story got a new date slapped onto it (no doubt by one of those smart-alecky computers),
and the rest is history. Or it would have been, had not people begun to realize that something was terribly amiss.

Oddly, I can sympathize with whoever thought they were on to something big and decided to stick it in a Bloomberg business newsletter. Maybe you can, too. For a portion of any given week, parts of my
day job as a reporter on media technology is to scour dozens of technical Web sites to see what nuggets can be gleaned amid all the over-hyped and info-overloaded data. A lot of news stories sound
vaguely familiar to begin with, and it’s not unusual to see an item posted online that might be dated, say, “Sept. 11, 2008,” and when you go back three or four layers on the Internet you discover that, for
example, when the story said “Jay Leno went to high-definition broadcasts only last November,” it was right, it was November — in 1998!

Apart from possibly destroying an entire airline (which would have somehow seemed even more tragic a few years ago when we actually liked the airlines), there can be mildly amusing results of this
Internet data world where old news goes to die and never does. Once in a rare while, I’ll notice that some publication or Web site had published a really old story — and no one ever noticed. And with
increasing frequency, I’ll delve down into several layers of totally unknown or brand new Web sites and find my own musings (including this column, which dates back to late 1985) which I apparently
wrote years ago and are long-forgotten (thankfully).

It was a bit scary this week to see how quickly a large group of so-called adults (who are apparently savvy enough to know which stocks they own, unlike some of us) have traded their stocks in, based
on purely erroneous headlines on the Internet. It also wasn’t terribly comforting to see how slow the media reacted to finally report the mistake and issue corrections, and for the airline itself to finally issue
a denial. (Media Relations people are always the last to know. Trust me.)

So maybe the next time we hear about the next big disaster (financial or otherwise), we should take pause before taking any definitive action (and yes, putting that silly old chestnut “he who hesitates is
lost” to bed forever). I’m glancing over at one of my Web sites right now, and glad to see all the news stories today seem to be timely.

Contact John Merli at .