ABCNews.com jumped the gun on the Timothy McVeigh verdicts Monday afternoon, posting that the Oklahoma City bombing defendant was guilty approximately an hour before the jurors had made their verdicts known in a Denver courtroom.
Spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the error was a "technical glitch" caused by a misunderstanding about servers used on the site, which launched just last month. ABCNews.com uses a staging server to hold the prepared news before posting it live, but executives were unaware that the ticker function uploads information live directly.
"We've never done the ticker updating this way," said Murphy. Both headlines - "McVeigh Not Guilty" and "McVeigh Guilty" - ran for an undetermined amount of time. "It was not up for very long," assured Murphy. "Someone noticed immediately and ... deleted it from the ticker."
It's common practice for news organizations to prepare alternate headlines and stories should such a ruling go either way in order to get the news out as quickly as possible. But this isn't the first time an online news operation has had problems with a high-profile verdict. In October 1995, Pathfinder declared O. J. Simpson "Guilty" in his criminal trial, moments after the jury had acquitted him.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
