In criticism of placed biz news stories

Yvette Kantrow, the executive editor of The Deal, writes about how some companies continue to “give” stories to certain business news outlets in the wake of The Wall Street Journal‘s story Monday about ExpressScripts’ deal to purchase NextRx.

Kantrow writes, “Media Maneuvers has always been obsessed with strategic placements, going back to the early years of the decade, when the Journal rode them to deal scoop dominance. But as the merger boom sputtered and many of the era’s biggest deals revealed themselves to be duds, strategic placements came in for a drubbing, with groups including Ralph Nader’s Commercial Alert complaining about selective disclosure of merger news.

“The charge was simple: Placements, by their very nature, ensure prominent, positive, or at least noncritical, deal coverage, since no reporter is going to want to bite the hand that’s feeding him by injecting skepticism into an ‘exclusive’ piece. 

“The brouhaha faded with the merger boom, but when the deal markets returned a few years later, strategic placements, for the most part, did not return with them. With more and more news outlets, including blogs, training their eyes on mergers and acquisitions, keeping a deal under wraps until it could be ‘placed’ became more difficult.”

Read more here.