Why I heart good metadata

This story, about a reporter's mistake, is one I'd like to figure out how to incorporate in teaching. In sum:

- Reporter for a financial service finds a news story dated September 7, 2008 on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel website (see image here), via a Google News search about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy. The article was actually written six years earlier.
- Massive sell-off begins, even though the article is taken down minutes later and disclaimers are published. Stock tanks.
- Google offers this explanation describing how a six-year-old article came to be posted as news.

Lessons learned:

- Metadata rules. If the story had been encoded with the original date (and the reporter's name, keywords, etc.), this fiasco wouldn't have been possible because the Google News algorithms wouldn't have picked it up.
- Do your research. Something should have told this financial reporter that things were amiss. Such a huge story wouldn't be reported just once. Not everything you read online is as it seems, even when the source appears to be reputable.

Ouch. I don't want to even think about whose heads are rolling.