Investing

The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Companies With The Most Negative Press (6/22)

Gannett will layoff 700 people which caused a torrent of negative press coverage Carnival and GM were both victims of concern about oil price changes. The Flame Index started as a research tool in 2008 at the NY Innovation Design…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published June 22, 2011, 10:48am ET · 1 min read

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Gannett will layoff 700 people which caused a torrent of negative press coverage

Carnival and GM were both victims of concern about oil price changes. The Flame Index started as a research tool in 2008 at the NY Innovation Design Lab (nyidlab). It was used as a general metric to evaluate companies and their risk in the media. Publicly traded Fortune 500 companies are used as a measure to calculate an overall market of negative news and the companies are ranked within that market.

Rank Company Ticker Score Change in Rank Comments
2 Gannett GCI 34.609 +153  Will layoff 700 people
21 News Corp. NWSA 20.251 +120  Hulu, partially owned by NWS for sale
30 Marshall & Ilsley Corp. MI 19.115 +304  Deal for Bank of Montreal to buy MI closes
32 Dollar Tree DLTR 18.96 +83  Concerns about retail sales?
36 Exxon Mobil XOM 18.293 +93  Wild ride of oil prices
39 Carnival Corp. CCL 17.842 +656  Fuel costs for ships hurt margins
42 Lockheed Martin LMT 17.094 +538  Gets money for F-35, but otherwise no Paris Air Show news
45 Burlington Northern Santa Fe BNI 16.909 +158  How did this get here? Buffett bought it a year ago
46 Staples SPLS 16.487 +636  Canadian operation has data privacy trouble
49 General Motors GM 16.656 +188  High gas price will hurt holiday travel

Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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