Something is wrong with this:

This morning, we heard about US Airways proposing to merge with Delta for a mere $8B.

While doing some other stuff over at PR Newswire, we noticed that the image that accompanying the story on the home page had absolutely nothing to do with the news of the day (well, other than the fact that planes are involved).

Did a human editor make the error or was it the result of a computer automatically scouring the Internet looking at other news outlets’ image choices and pulling it in without someone approving?

Last week, Seth Godin called attention to how Google news automatically pulled up an image of a Tylenol bottle amid the store brand acetaminophen recall. Tylenol, was of course, not included in the recall. They’ve since taken out full page ads in top newspapers such as NYT to dispel any confusion. Man, they are getting to be pros at this recall crisis stuff!

Images on news Web sites, like in newspapers, are one of the top things that peoples’ eyes steer toward. But contrary to what you might think, eye tracking studies have shown that the most sought after information is the news item’s headline – particularly the one in the upper-left.

That’s a bit of a relief for PR Newswire this morning, which, while writing this post has since replaced the incorrect image with the US Airways logo.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 11:08 am and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.