Digital Media

TheStreet.com named co-founder and high-profile market commentator Jim Cramer as its chairman, in a move to separate the dual role of its Chief Executive Thomas Clarke.

The investor Web site noted that the separation of duties will allow Clarke to focus more on his efforts as CEO, during a period when the company is moving through a difficult economic environment.

The move by TheStreet.com to separate the positions is one that corporate America has increasingly embraced, though mainly to address corporate governance issues that have become a hot button in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Despite a down day for the broader markets Friday, a handful of tech stocks swam against the tide, posting modest single-digit gains.

The trading performance of Google, eBay, and Symantec on Friday.

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

Google, Symantec, and eBay were just some of the tech companies to finish the day in the black. The CNET Tech Index was down a modest 1.59 points to end the day at 1,185.55.

Google closed up 5.53 percent to $372.54 a share, which comes as little surprise considering the tech titan posted stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings results on Thursday. And on Friday, a number of analysts released largely positive comments on the quarter, while giving a cautious outlook for the coming quarters and years on revenue growth.

eBay, meanwhile, was up 2.54 percent to $15.35 a share, a welcome change for the e-commerce giant which earlier in the week saw its shares punished after posting its third-quarter results, in which it revised its fourth-quarter projections downward.

Symantec, meanwhile, gained 4.09 percent to close at $15.28 a share. The security software giant may have gotten a lift following a report in Barron's that investors may find a safe harbor in security software stocks.

As for the broader markets, they ended a wild week in the red.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 127.04 points at 8,852.22--a rather modest ending to a week that saw the Dow soar 936.42 points on Monday, marking its largest single one-day gain; it then traversed back and forth, crossing the 9,000 mark several times throughout the week.

The Nasdaq closed down 6.42 points to close the session at 1,711.29, while the S&P 500 dipped 5.88 points to finish up at 940.55.

The following chart shows Friday's closing numbers:

What was the unlikely culprit behind a 75 percent drop in United Airlines' stock on Monday? An erroneous Google News search, that's what.

The problem was that an investor news service, the South Florida-based Income Securities Advisors, found a Chicago Tribune article from 2002 via Google News and consequently included it in that day's news digest--which wound up on Bloomberg's news wire. The content of the story wasn't the sort you want to be publishing if it isn't true: that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. Considering the state of the airline industry today, it was by no means unbelievable, especially considering that United only emerged from bankruptcy in 2006.

By the time United put out a release denying the news, its stock had plummeted 75 percent from $12.30 on Friday to less than $3. It eventually climbed back up to $10.49; Chicago Tribune parent company Tribune Co. pulled the 6-year-old story from its online archives to avoid further confusion. But Nasdaq, which lists United Airline's stock (UAL), decided against rescinding trades that had happened as a result of the mishap.

Income Securities Advisors later said the story had turned up in a bankruptcy-related Google News search, with no time stamp attached. But different accounts of how it exactly happened upon the story don't fully add up.

The Tribune Co. effectively blamed Google's automated news search process, where headlines are filtered by bots and algorithms rather than by humans. The Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday that the six-year-old story "prominently popped up" in a news search, a position usually reserved for very recent news. The reason for its prominence, Google later explained, was that it had wound up on a list of most-read stories on the Web site of the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, another Tribune Co. newspaper. Increased traffic to the story, Google said, set off the bot--as did the fact that the day of the week that the original story was published was a Monday and hence lined up.

Bloomberg has admitted that it doesn't verify the accuracy of the news that comes over its financial data service through third-party partners. But, the Chicago Tribune reported after the fact, there's no evidence of malicious stock manipulation in this case.

Considering the lightning-speed nature of news on the Web, investors have had the occasional sobering reminder that online media isn't always accurate. Last year, a hoax memo published to a blog convinced many a securities professional that there would be delays in the release of the original iPhone, sending Apple's stock tumbling and leading to occasional whispers that someone may have been trying to manipulate the stock price. But the United Airlines situation is unique in that there was no hoax involved--the Tribune story was a real one, albeit old, and nobody appears to have been pulling a prank.

Late last month, Bloomberg accidentally sent the draft of a Steve Jobs obituary over the wire momentarily; luckily, it was pulled before incorrect reports of the Apple CEO's demise could have any effect on company stock.

This post was updated to clarify Income Security Advisors' relationship to Bloomberg, and expanded at 7:41 a.m. PT.

In an investor call Wednesday, Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes focused on the old media. You probably would have, too, if you could downplay AOL's dial-up business in favor of the late Heath Ledger's acclaimed performance in The Dark Knight.

Television and film at Time Warner are indeed beating Wall Street's expectations. The record-breaking Batman film, while its financials won't be reported until the third quarter, is on track to become the second highest-grossing movie of all time (behind 1997's Titanic). At the same time, HBO miniseries John Adams was a critically acclaimed hit, the presidential election battleground is doing great things for CNN, and TNT's original programming is succeeding.

Why so serious? Even though ad revenue on AOL's network is down, a certain summer blockbuster has meant that Time Warner has more colorful stuff to talk about.

(Credit: Warner Bros.)

"Our goal at Time Warner is to create, package, and distribute high-quality, branded content across multiple platforms and all around the world--TV screens, computer screens, movie screens, magazine pages, anywhere that media content goes in the world," Bewkes said.

In other words, a dial-up Internet service and a cable provider are excess baggage--which is why it's chosen to hack off Time Warner Cable into a separate business and will separate the "access" and "audience" divisions of AOL." If you believe the widespread rumors, the company may be gearing up to sell one or both of them.

But, as Bewkes explained, the separation within AOL won't be completely clean. He described it as a three-way rather than two-way chop, cutting it into "access," "audience," and a "shared service group that will support both of the operating groups."

Around 604,000 people severed their AOL access subscriptions in the second quarter, a sign that the business is continuing to fade away. But on the bright side, it's the smallest subscription decline the company has seen since AOL announced its "refocus" two years ago.

"We will assess all of the options, and I think all of you have written or read about pretty much every conceivable one," Bewkes explained when asked what he would do with the access business amid speculation that he's packaging it for a sale. "One that ought to be thought about really as a benchmark, let's say...would just be operating it and seeing if the cash flow from that operation is superior to any yield we can get putting it into alignment with some of the usual suspects that they're mentioning."

The CEO said he has faith in the revamped, ad-centric AOL.

"There continue to be encouraging signs about the underlying health of the business," he said. Page views are up 6 percent year over year, there's been about a 60 percent growth in content, and recent relaunches have been a "success." He blamed some of the lag on "acquisition integration issues" and management reorganizations, referring obliquely to the handful of ad-industry acquisitions that have been rolled up into its Platform-A technology, as well as the $850 million purchase of social network Bebo. That acquisition closed in May.

Paying that much for Bebo, a teen-focused social network with a user base primarily in the U.K. and Ireland, raised some eyebrows. AOL has said that it will integrate it closely with its AIM and ICQ instant-messaging clients, and has indeed grouped the three into a "People Networks" division headed by former Bebo CEO Joanna Shields.

"Our third-party advertising business continued to deliver solid growth, even in a difficult advertising environment, which highlights the competitive position and the value of Platform-A." The ad platform is "fully integrated," he said, with once-disparate acquisitions worked into a single package for clients, and AOL has guaranteed revenue to software developers as an incentive to use it in social network applications.

Platform-A was assembled from just under a billion dollars in purchases.

But display advertising on AOL is down 14 percent, with noticeable pullbacks in industries like automotive, financial services, telecom, and travel--similar niches to the ones that have pushed the company's Time Inc. print ads down 9 percent.

Bewkes' predecessor, Richard Parsons, stepped down amid lukewarm stock performance at the beginning of the year. Thus far, Bewkes hasn't reversed that trend.

This post was last updated at 8:48 a.m. PDT.