The beauty of the internal leak

Conde Nast Portfolio‘s Jack Flack writes Monday about how a Wall Street Journal story this morning used a Merrill Lynch CEO quote from a video shown internally to employees rather than the quotes from the company press release.

Flack wrote, “The only real question in this case is whether the video was captured by an industrious reporter, or strategically leaked by clever flacks at Merrill.

“Strategically leaked? Yes, a savvy flack knows that reporters will always be far less interested in something that is targeted at them than in something that is supposed to be kept away from them, particularly if none of their competitors have it.

“And oh, there are a couple of other good reasons why the internal quote was page-one material: it’s not only far more interesting than the quotes from the release, but it also actually sounds like something O’Neal or another human being might actually say.”

Read more here. And remember, Talking Biz News is offering a Conde Nast Portfolio subscription to the reader who can correctly guess Jack Flack’s true identity.