Tribune, Google now agree on how United Airlines story appeared

Steve Myers, the online news editor at the Poynter Institute, writes Tuesday that the Tribune Co. and Google now agree on how a six-year-old story about United Airlines being in bankruptcy court made it onto one of the newspaper company’s Web sites — and caused the airline’s stock to plummet.

Myers writes, “Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said the date that appears on a Google News listing is determined by information associated with the article — when it was published or updated.Â

“Google says its crawler indexed the site at 10:36 p.m. PDT Saturday (Sept. 6), which was 1:36 a.m. EDT Sunday. The only date on the United article was the one just below the SunSentinel.com logo, which merely reflects the current date.Â

“‘I don’t think it’s unreasonable to clearly note what the correct date is for that story, in some easy-to-find, prominent location,’ Stricker said Tuesday.

“Mauker acknowledged that the story was undated. He said that no stories on his site are dated, but that’s not so. Other articles have a date and time stamp below the headline. ‘This was a six-year-old story that got picked up and nobody bothered to verify it as being current,’ he said.”

Read more here.Â