Ed Hammond, an M&A correspondent with the FT between 2013 and 2015 and a senior deals reporter at Bloomberg from 2015 to 2023, writes for FT Alphaville about the life of covering mergers and acquisitions.
Hammond writes, “As a deal reporter, it was my job to find a certain sort of information before it got out. You could say discovering that not yet known and then making it so basically describes journalism. Deal reporting, though, is unusual in being fixated only on breaking news. Success means getting scoops and that means finding leaks. Here’s how I got mine.
“It’s not like they tell you in the movies. Slipped documents, husky darkness, every conversation an unending coil of gun smoke. I’m sure it happens. 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 — on calls, on planes, on beaches, golf courses, and dates; at school gates and at sporting events, industry dinners and trade fairs, in meetings, in restaurants, in the backs of taxis, in bars, and IRL; they do it entre nous or under the rose or above board or just straight up – and when they do, the information travels, outward because that’s the only direction information travels.
“A simple formula for deal reporting is that Success = Relationships x Indiscretion, and that struggle to keep secrets, to hold within oneself information with currency beyond ‘did you catch the game’, is real. If knowledge is power, showing it off is pleasure. 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. Boasting, rambling, gossiping, just being fallible enough to want your importance seen; frame it how you want, Freud was right: ‘no mortal can keep a secret.”
Read more here.
