Tribune Says Link to Old United Story Was on Web Site (Update1)

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Tribune Co. said a link to the 6- year-old article on UAL Corp.'s 2002 bankruptcy filing appeared on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Web site before another news organization mistakenly presented the story as new.

Traffic in the newspaper's database pushed a link to the old article to the most-viewed section of the Web site's business page early on Sept. 7 and was picked up by a Google Inc. search agent, Chicago-based Tribune said today. The December 2002 Chicago Tribune news report was not re-published and no new story was distributed, the company said.

An erroneous report from Income Securities Advisors Inc. triggered a 76 percent skid in shares of UAL, parent of United Airlines, before trading was halted yesterday. An Income Securities summary appeared on the Bloomberg terminal, and Bloomberg News published its own headline before correcting the story. Chicago-based UAL issued a statement yesterday to assure investors it hadn't filed for bankruptcy.

UAL ended yesterday losing 11 percent on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Today the shares dropped 32 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $10.60.

United yesterday demanded a retraction from the Sun- Sentinel and said it was launching an investigation. UAL filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 9, 2002, and left court supervision on Feb. 1, 2006. United is the world's second-biggest airline by passenger traffic.

Tribune owns both the Chicago Tribune and the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Sun-Sentinel.

Automated Search

Google, owner of the world's most-used Internet search engine, said in a blog post late yesterday that an automated search picked up the link to the story after it appeared in the ``Popular Stories: Business'' most-viewed section of the Sun- Sentinel site.

Mountain View, California-based Google said that the only date found in the context of the article was Sept. 7, 2008 and the program was unable to recognize that the story was old. Google News removed the story after being notified of an error.

Richard Lehmann, president of the research firm, said the story was found through a routine online search for news stories about 2008 bankruptcy filings.

Bloomberg LP is the parent of Bloomberg News.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jennifer Sondag at jsondag@bloomberg.net.