The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: March 22 Companies With The Most Bad News

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) was swamped with bad press as it was sued by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) over patents on technology used in the Nook e-reader. PG&G has applied to renew licenses to operate two nuclear plants in California. That process is now in jeopardy. BP faced more bad press as future drilling in the North Sea came under scrutiny by the UK government. Bad press about Hartford Finance rose because it does a great deal o f business in China

Note: The Flame Index scans thousands of news sites 24 hours per day and ranks companies getting the most negative press right now. The Flame Index Media Analysis Algorithm crunches the data for an up-to-the-minute ranking of the hardest-hit companies.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
1 Fannie Mae FNMAS 58.847 +2 Concerns about viability stay high
2 Freddie Mac FMCC 58.157 0 Ditto
3 Barnes & Noble BKS 51.175 +731 IP lawsuit over Nook
4 Hewlett-Packard HP 50.399 +2 Concerns about new CEO plans
5 International Business Machines IBM 48.574 -4 Tech stocks hurt by valuations
6 Google GOOG 44.566 +35 Gmail service blocked in China
7 American International Group AIG 39.337 +35 Will try to dump weak derivative paper
8 Toyota Motor Corporation TM 36.822 +2 Manufacturing interruptions in Japan
9 General Motors GM 36.65 -2 Could face Japan parts shortages
10 Quest Diagnostics DGX 36.305 -6 Will offer $1.2 billion in new debt
3 Barnes & Noble BKS 51.175 +731 IP suit
17 BP BP 29.897 +62 North Sea drilling
21 NRG Energy NRG 27.671 +92 Nuclear energy exposure
22 Hartford Financial Services HIG 27.541 +77 Does business in Japan
23 PG&E Corp. PCG 26.564 +258 Nuclear plant face headwinds

Data and ranking provided by the Flame Index.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author 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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