How the biz media helped oust Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal

The Deal executive editor Yvette Kantrow writes Friday about how a story leaked last week to the New York Times about Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal helped unleash coverage that pushed the executive out the door.

Kantrow wrote, “The leak is an object lesson in how the media can be used to push out a CEO. For us, the amount of dissection going on is significant by itself. Covering the coverage has emerged as a handy-dandy way to weigh in on an event and appear in-the-know without actually reporting anything. (Gasparino, an avid reporter, is an exception among the commentators mentioned above.) Hey, we should know. We started this column eight years ago partly to examine leaks routinely delivered to the deal press — leaks we weren’t getting. It was our way of glomming onto the action.

“Now, opining on the minutiae of the business media is a cottage industry, especially in the blogosphere, where linking to what others report is routine. But why just link when you can discuss, adopting a patina of newsiness along the way? Take Portfolio. At the Future of Business Media Conference last week, publisher David Carey told attendees that Portfolio.com “somewhat legitimizes” the magazine’s monthly frequency. His example: Portfolio’s latest cover story that put forth Merrill and Morgan Stanley as merger candidates. As the O’Neal story unfolded, Carey said, Portfolio.com was filled with conversations about Merrill, underscoring the timeliness of the magazine piece.

“Never mind that most of these conversations were about the Times’ piece, not Portfolio’s ho-hum cover story. In this conversation it doesn’t matter what you say; it’s that you’re having it at all. The traditional definition of a scoop is that you got something first. The new definition is that you were the first in the neighborhood to yak about it. The O’Neal defenestration featured both.”

Read more here.