Reorg Research does not have to disclose sources, court rules

Financial news site Reorg Research does not have to disclose the sources of stories it published about Murray Energy Corp., according to an appeals court ruling Thursday.

The ruling upholds New York’s Shield Law.

Reorg Research, a Manhattan-based corporate intelligence news service sent two news alerts last year to its subscribers — many of them hedge fund managers and professional investors — with breaking articles about Murray Energy, one of the country’s largest coal mining operations.

The alerts were based on information from anonymous sources and claimed that Murray had recently reached an important collective bargaining agreement with its workers and described some details of internal negotiations that the company had held with its debt holders.

Murray argued that the information was disclosed by some of its investors who had signed confidentiality agreements.

The court ruled that “the public benefits secondarily from the information that respondent provides to its limited audience, because that audience is comprised of the people who are most interested in this information and most able to use and benefit from it.”

The court disclosed that Reorg Research has 375 subscribers that pay between $30,000 and $120,000 a year depending on the number of users.