Confessions of a former star M&A reporter
Ed Hammond is founding partner of Collected Strategies, a PR firm. He was an M&A correspondent with the FT between 2013 and 2015 and a senior deals reporter at Bloomberg from 2015 to 2023. Information doesn’t really leak. Taps and hoses leak, so too engines, gutters, gas lines, and, in England anyway, roofs. Leaks puddle and pool and come by accident. Information, though, as soon as it exists, strains against containment. It’s active. Seeking an out, it breaches promises, firewalls and duties, ironclad non-disclosure agreements, and people — mostly people — to make itself known. 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