Error
Information, though, as soon as it exists, strains against containment. It’s active. Seeking an out, it breaches promises, firewalls and duties, ironclad non-disclosure agreements, and people — mostly people — to make itself known.
Most reporting, though, isn’t like that. Mostly it involves talking to people in quite boring, well-lit places and gathering the scraps needed to make a story. Fortunately, people like to talk.
A simple formula for deal reporting is that Success = Relationships x Indiscretion.
And it’s through this indulgence, the way we thrill at not just knowing more than our companion but showing him that we do, that confidences find easy passage.
To give them their dues, most don’t, at least not in big, gut-spilling ways. They deal in factoids, obliquely confirming and correcting, hinting and steering and shaping and curating their role, because no one wants to be the source — a source maybe, or one of many who helped you get it over the line, or, better still, the I can’t say but I would say if you were wrong person. No one wants to feel compromised or leaky. Part of the deal reporter’s job is reassuring her sources that they are not sources.
Envy too is here. [...] All can seek solace in leaking to damage their rivals.
Crime
Organised crime is quite a recent and yet profoundly relevant factor in deal reporting today. At the time I left the beat in 2023, the volume of information coming in from so-called Mystery Men had risen over five years: from almost nothing to about a quarter of all the tips our team received.
Established media is perfect for achieving this. It disseminates information widely and impacts heavily because it is (mostly) believed.
This confirming process turns stolen material into laundered, market-moving facts. And it does so with little risk of capture because the media works differently from other repositories of ill-begotten product. While banks are legally required to refuse or report sources of dirty money, the media will die to protect those who provide it with information.
As a group, they are more prolific than any single source could hope to be. Despite not being involved in any M&A, their tips can be almost comically detailed, running across multiple text screens and spanning everything from deal terms to project code names, timelines and cell phones of the various advisers and executives involved. Being motivated only by making money, they are liberated of the moral and emotional tides that turn within many source-reporter relations. Their information is sometimes spot on, other times nonsense. The Mystery Men don’t care.
I worry, though, that by providing such protein-rich information, it will gradually erode deal reporters’ ability to forage; when detailed tips arrive in your lap, why bother going out to hunt?
Tactical
In my experience, tactical leaks are rare, requiring a balance of risk appetite and a sophistication about navigating media that is unusual, certainly in public company M&A.
Luck
It happens. Every so often, a reporter gets sent an email by mistake or overhears a conversation at a bar or sits next to someone on a train who just can’t resist opening a PowerPoint draft. Or, as happened to me once, goes to a job interview in a different industry and is told about something directly related to a story they are chasing.