The Upshot: Yahoo! Finance, Your Source for Nifty Fifty News

Imagine how nutty it would be for Newsweek to run a cover photo of former President George Bush's inaugural and try to pass it off as George W.'s swearing-in. Well, as crazy as that sounds, that's the type of historical accuracy that Yahoo! (YHOO Quote) is apparently aiming for in a recent advertisement.

OK, OK. With Yahoo!'s trading suspended Wednesday in anticipation of an post-close announcement, we here at TheStreet.com suspect that the pictorial accuracy of Yahoo!'s ads isn't a major concern right now. All the same, we're not going to let this pass.

The source of our shock and displeasure is a magazine advertisement for Yahoo! Finance that appeared in Red Herring, an ad that pitches the financial Web site as the place to go for inside dope on Wall Street. Featuring an aerial photo of Manhattan's financial district, the ad proclaims, "Feel left in," adding, "With Yahoo! Finance you'll get stock quotes, research and the latest market news. We'll even show you the secret investor's handshake. Shhh."

Sounds great. Except for one little, itty-bitty problem. Once you start looking at the photo, which appears to be an unremarkable recent shot of the Wall Street area, you realize that a whole bunch of financial landmarks are missing. The building complex known as the World Financial Center, home of Merrill Lynch, isn't there. Neither are towers housing offices of Prudential Securities, the Nasdaq, Chase Manhattan Bank and other financial institutions. Nor are two other landmarks on the New York City financial scene: the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the two tallest buildings in the city.

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Given that the World Trade Center towers were dedicated in 1973, what it comes down to is this: To illustrate the idea that Yahoo! is giving you the latest inside view of the world of finance, the company is using a picture that's at least 28 years old. Sort of like a Seattle Web site promising insider, up-to-the-minute sports news, then labeling an old photo of the demolished Kingdome as a recent shot of the Mariners' Safeco field.

"Oops," says Holly Stuart Hughes, editor-in-chief of the photo industry magazine Photo District News. "That's a boo-boo."

John Yost, co-founder of Yahoo!'s longtime ad agency, Black Rocket, insists otherwise. He didn't work on that ad himself, he says, but he says he's sure that whoever at his agency did, those people knew it was an old photo. "I'm sure the art director on that particular one knew precisely what he was buying," Yost says.

So why, precisely, would you use a decades-old cityscape to give the world the impression that Yahoo! Finance is on top of the latest news? Well, says Yost, when you use a stock photo like the one in the ad -- that is, a photo out of a library rather than one shot expressly for an ad or article -- you take what's available at the right price. Besides, Yost says, most readers would look at a picture like this for a "nanosecond," so all that's really necessary is giving people the impression that this is Manhattan. "We were not going for reality here," he says.

Makes sense -- that is, if you, like Black Rocket, are a San Francisco-based agency with a client from Silicon Valley. Um, how would Yost feel about running a picture of San Francisco with the Transamerica building missing from the skyline? "It depends on what you're trying to accomplish," he replies.

Memo to Newsweek: You can fire that White House photographer of yours. You already have four years' worth of Bush photos to recycle.