Radio Station Duped by Google News Into Airing Old Sex.com Story
Monday, March 15th, 2010
Google News results in radio station picking up three-year-old story.
[Update: KLIV has posted a note on its home page about the error: "We Goofed! Earlier today KLIV aired a story, reprinted here on KLIV.com, regarding former Internet entrepreneur Stephen Cohen’s legal dispute with the web site Sex.com. While the domain name is up for auction this week the information regarding Cohen was taken from a 2007 Associated Press story regarding a court case which we erroneously reported took place last week. We regret the error and we thank the web site DomainNameWire-dot-com for calling it to our attention."]
Radio station 1590 KLIV in Silicon Valley should do more than rely on Google News for its story ideas.
The station aired a story “One-time owner of Sex.com in San Jose court says, ‘I’m penniless’”, apparently today March 15 (according to the time stamp on its web site). The story discusses how Sex.com thief Stephen Cohen appeared in San Jose court last week pleading poverty. He owes $65 million in damages. The story also refers to this week’s auction of the Sex.com domain name.
What’s wrong with this story? Well, those that followed the Sex.com story might be having a bit of deja vu. You see, Cohen actually showed up in court three years ago to plead poverty to the judge.
Here’s what appears to have happened. A 2007 Associated Press story about Cohen going back to court somehow got picked up by Google News with a date of March 14, 2010:
Someone at the station must have read it but not noticed the February 2007 dateline on the actual article.
1) copy basics of article
2) don’t source it
3) whoops
Now we’ll see how far stories like this can spread. KLIV’s story is now on Google News. Will someone else pick it up?
This isn’t the first time someone picked something old up in Google News resulting in a mistake. Consider the time it cost United Airlines about 75% of its share value. The Google News site disclaimer notes that timestamps are based on when Google News discovers a story, not the actual dateline.
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