Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Reuters & Lockheed Martin: Pick a Headline, Any Headline

Separate the Hacks from the Pros


'Reuters': Hacktastic 

I did my usual Google for F-35 news this AM and spotted a Reuters article about LockMart's quarterly earnings. Fine. What caught my eye first was the graphic:
  
I noted the title only in passing.

This evening I repeated the search, and saw the same graphic, only there was also a different headline attached:
 I went looking for the first headline and found it at Business Insider with a short blurb instead of an article (source of the first graphic above) but still attributed to Reuters:
:
Here's a bigger shot of tonight's article:

So what gives? Did a new quarterly report revision/update come out?

Nahhhhh.........

It just took Reuter's editorial staff a little time to decide how the wanted to report the news. How is everyone else reporting it?...

 
I see sides drawn here. 

The electronic rags the 'bizness' types follow seem to take the positive bent. The yellow journalism ratholes pick the negative. 

Note that while "sales rose", "earnings were weak", but the LM folks 'beat' the estimates (which is what you always want to do), and the F-35 has 'higher' demand. 

Note: There is an unusual factor involving an accounting change due to tax law changes (surprise) that moves money from one column to another and shifts the earnings downward. It's affecting a lot of companies. [sarc] I'm certain Reuters explains it rationally in their 'revised' article [/sarc]

Full disclosure: To the best of my knowledge I own ZERO Lockheed Martin Stock, but some may be in some fund or another that is managed for me.  

2 comments:

Marauder said...

Peter Hitchens has commented on the tendency for even rival news publications to want to converge on the coverage of a particular story.

I listened to the LM earnings conference call hoping for some info on LRS-B.

If you have the bandwidth, I'd love to see a discussion on the manner in which block builds are built and tested.

SMSgt Mac said...

Alas, though my DETAIL knowledge on the subject is now stale, I can't find much in the public domain I can refer to, and going into much detail at this point would probably violate a half-dozen non-disclosure and proprietary agreements. Someday, I'll be able to tell the world how I wanted to do it. Now I just get to tell those guys when we get together for lunch every now and then: 'told you so'. ;-)