I might win this one…
I’m a business journalist. A couple of months ago a company called me with a story about a project it’s developing in an unexplored region. It was a slow news day, so I did the interview.

This company was the junior partner in this project, so I called the other (much larger) firm involved to check out the rest of the story out. They gave me the same spiel, but did say “this is a pilot project that we’re looking forward to developing” – a quote I used in my article.

That, it turned out, was a bit of a mistake. Calling something a “pilot” project means you’re just trying something out, and to the larger company, this was technically true. However, for the smaller company, calling it a pilot accidentally gave this project the impression that it wouldn’t make any money, at least for a while – which wasn’t what they’d told their investors.

When my story came out the next day, using that one innocuous word caused the junior company’s stock to sell off by a third, leading to an ‘interesting’ discussion to say the least. Thankfully, I was able to prove it wasn’t my fault but theirs, as they hadn’t got their story straight with their partner and I had his quote on tape. However, they haven’t exactly beaten down my door to write about them again.

Total cost: $20 million, give or take...
(silencer, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 20:08, Reply)