The 24/7 Wall St./Flame Index: Companies With The Worst Press (5/3/2011)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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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 Sony Corporation SNE 93.604 +1  Playstation. Hacker. Say no more.
2 Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A 68.05 -1  Reputation problems with Sokol mess begin to disappear
3 DISH Network DISH 42.107 +64  Cuts deal to be law suits with Tivo
4 Cephalon CEPH 40.227 +710  Teva buyout but shareholders want a lot more money
5 Community Health Systems CYH 38.114 +5  Raises off for Tenet
6 Arch Coal ACI 37.101 +91  Investors don’t like bid to purchase ICG
7 Massey Energy MEE 35.388 -4  Bad earnings, memory of mine disaster
8 Google GOOG 34.954 +5  South Korea raids search company’s offices
9 Rite Aid RAD 34.164 -2  Concern about ongoing same-store sales stagnation
10 American Electric Power AEP 30.215 +9  Nuclear power victim
4 Cephalon CEPH 40.227 +710  Teva deal.
17 Hartford Financial Services HIG 23.929 +691  A profit, at last
18 Fannie Mae FNM 23.028 +92
20 Abbott Laboratories ABT 21.593 +677  Rivals Pfizer and BSX do well.
25 Toyota Motor Corporation TM 20.147 +236  Car sales in Japan home market trashed.

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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