Reporting on Yahoo! earnings missed the mark

TheStreet.com media critic Marek Fuchs writes that the stories about Yahoo’s earnings were off the mark in reporting that the results weren’t as bad as expected.

Fuchs writes, “The Business Press Maven is trying to wrap his head around this one: Yahoo! missed expectations, and yet it didn’t. Or, rather, the company missed one set of expectations (the one you can see) but, uh, surpassed another set (the one you can’t). Or something like that.

“The confusion, I believe, stems from the business media’s need to attach a meaningful-sounding explanation to a blip in Yahoo!’s stock price, a thinly traded after-hours bounce after the company reported post-market close Tuesday.

“Take a look at this Associated Press headline, for example:

“Yahoo 2Q profit erodes but not as badly as feared:
Yahoo’s second-profit profit drops 18 percent but erosion isn’t as bad as investors feared.”

“The article’s second sentence gets right to work telling this tale of two expectations:

‘While the results released Tuesday missed analyst expectations, the performance wasn’t as bad as many investors feared after Internet search and advertising leader Google Inc. disappointed Wall Street with its second-quarter earnings last week.'”

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