The Financial Times is to review its digital publishing practices after publishing an inaccurate article about the European Central Bank’s decision on whether to change interest rates.
The newspaper published an online article saying the ECB had “confounded expectations” by deciding to hold interest rates rather than cut them, minutes ahead of the official announcement.
The ECB’s announcement, a major event for the newspaper which ran a live blog of build-up and reaction, was to in fact to cut interest rates.
The online article temporarily caused the euro to plummet.
Correction: please ignore earlier tweet headlined "ECB leaves rates unchanged in shock decision". This was published in error.
— FT Markets (@FTMarkets) December 3, 2015
The FT moved to take the story down and publish a second piece about the ECB cutting rates to a “historic low”.
Around 45 minutes later, the newspaper published an explanation and apology for the uncharacteristic error.
The FT said it had pre-written two stories to cover different possible ECB decisions.
The wrong one had been posted just before the official announcement due to an editing error.
“Automated feeds meant that the initial error was compounded by being simultaneously published on Twitter,” said the FT. “The FT deeply regrets this serious mistake and will immediately be reviewing its publication and workflow processes to ensure such an error cannot happen again.”
