Categories: OLD Media Moves

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.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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