Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…These are the words that, like, we read a lot of these articles given what we do on this show. I think probably if you’re not in the industry, like eyes just gloss right over that, what does that mean, but coded in that language are these indications about what the genesis of the story is. So, I’ll give you a little bit more. There’s a lot of inside baseball things that you would never know to look for unless you’re talking to a reporter. You can sometimes glean where the information is coming from based on who the reporter is. So, people that cover M&A, you have to look up what these people do and what their jobs are. So, on a given story there maybe three bylines. The first byline is typically where the main information has come from. Almost all major news organizations does this. So the person with the first byline usually has gotten the critical or maybe the first piece of information to kick off a scoop. This is based purely on fresh news scoops. Well, sometimes on a deal, reporter #1 is let’s say, the activist investor reporter. So you know that the information came from the activist because otherwise, that person wouldn’t be on the story. In other cases, maybe the first byline is, let’s say, Verizon just bought Yahoo. Well, we have a different Verizon reporter than a Yahoo reporter. Same with the Wall Street Journal. Same with Reuters. Take a look at who the first byline is. If the first byline is that Yahoo reporter, then the main information came from Yahoo or someone involved with Yahoo. So then maybe the last byline is the Verizon reporter. Then you could say, “All right, well then that person probably just called Verizon to check up on that the information from the Yahoo site was right.” So you can sort of figure out where the information came from. It’s not always a leak though which is very important I think for people. We’re not talking about strategic leaks all the time. And we actually talk about this. If you go to Episode 7 of my Deal of the Week podcast, I talk about this with the other two M&A reporters at Bloomberg. A lot of the information simply comes from what I would say to some degree is coincidence, which is I have been trying to get a meeting with a person for weeks or months and finally, this person has said yes. So I have lunch or coffee with them and I’m able to ask the right questions to the right person to get information. Then I come back to the office. Well maybe it’s 7 at night at that point and we’ve made a decision at Bloomberg, “This story is not so important that it needs to go out at 7 at night. We’ll put it out tomorrow.” So then the story goes out tomorrow but, like, I had to have some sort of parent-teacher conference with my kid in the morning. So the story eventually goes out at like 3:00 in the afternoon. Well, there’s no strategy to that. But I think a lot of people read in and in fact you see it all the time on Twitter after stories I’ve broke in. Why did this story come out when it did? Like, there is way less into that than you think almost all the time. Like, the story went out when it did because like I got around to writing it when I did and I met with the right person at the right time. ere is way less into that than you think almost all the time. Like, the story went out when it did because like I got around to writing it when I did and I met with the right person at the right time. I would say 80% of the stories fall into that bucket and 20% of the stories fall into there’s some sort of reason for why the story is going out right now.…

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