The original version of this post appeared in the Financial Times on August 11, 2026.

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.

Error

It’s not like they tell you in the movies. Slipped documents, husky darkness, every conversation an unending coil of gun smoke. I’m sure it happens. Most reporting, though, isn’t like that. Mostly it involves talking to people in quite boring, well-lit places and gathering the scraps needed to make a story. Fortunately, people like to talk — on calls, on planes, on beaches, golf courses, and dates; at school gates and at sporting events, industry dinners and trade fairs, in meetings, in restaurants, in the backs of taxis, in bars, and IRL; they do it entre nous or under the rose or above board or just straight up – and when they do, the information travels, outward because that’s the only direction information travels.

A simple formula for deal reporting is that Success = Relationships x Indiscretion, and that struggle to keep secrets, to hold within oneself information with currency beyond “did you catch the game”, is real. If knowledge is power, showing it off is pleasure. And it’s through this indulgence, the way we thrill at not just knowing more than our companion but showing him that we do, that confidences find easy passage. Boasting, rambling, gossiping, just being fallible enough to want your importance seen; frame it how you want, Freud was right: “no mortal can keep a secret”.

It’s reasonable to ask: why would a source take the meeting at all? Why risk it?

Ego. It mocks our ability to assess our own risk management, imbues us with faith in our self-restraint greater than our experience usually merits, and causes us to overestimate our capacity for secrecy. And so, outside of the tactical considerations that I will get to, few people meet a reporter thinking they will leak anything. To give them their dues, most don’t, at least not in big, gut-spilling ways. They deal in factoids, obliquely confirming and correcting, hinting and steering and shaping and curating their role, because no one wants to be the source — a source maybe, or one of many who helped you get it over the line, or, better still, the I can’t say but I would say if you were wrong person. No one wants to feel compromised or leaky. Part of the deal reporter’s job is reassuring her sources that they are not sources.

Envy too is here. M&A runs on competition. Companies buy and sell to each other because of the existence or threat of, or opportunity to create, competitive change. Advisors compete for fees, for credit, for brand recognition; institutionally against industry peers, individually against internal rivals. At the end of the year, volume and value are totted up and league tables published. As with all winning, there is envy and someone usually feels hard done by. Most suck it up and keep trying, but some lose less well. Some brood, or scheme, or connive to settle the score. Some just rage. All can seek solace in leaking to damage their rivals.

Crime

Organised crime is quite a recent and yet profoundly relevant factor in deal reporting today. At the time I left the beat in 2023, the volume of information coming in from so-called Mystery Men had risen over five years: from almost nothing to about a quarter of all the tips our team received.

The Mystery Men are the last-mile delivery service for crime syndicates that steal or otherwise illegally acquire confidential information about the buying and selling of companies then trade to profit on it. The job of the Mystery Men is quite simply to get the information into the public domain in the most impactful way possible. The revelation that a company is going to sell itself can cause a massive increase in its share price, often within a few seconds after a headline is published. The syndicate, having built a position in the shares or options, is very suddenly 20 or 30 or 50 per cent richer.

Established media is perfect for achieving this. It disseminates information widely and impacts heavily because it is (mostly) believed. Now belief is an odd notion here, as nearly all the trading that occurs when news about M&A breaks is done by algorithmic robots, but those bots will buy with a much higher conviction if a story is in The Wall Street Journal than if it’s posted on an anonymous social media account.

Beyond amplifying and validating the information, the media provides another major benefit to the criminals.

Don’t believe the noise — newsrooms are places of checks and balances and standards and ethics. Your news, by the time you read it, has been vetted, scrutinised, determined to be fair and, most crucially of all, properly sourced. Mystery Men aren’t sources. They are anonymous tipsters whose information is worthless until it is confirmed by proper sources; in plain speak, identifiable people with knowledge of the facts at hand.

This confirming process turns stolen material into laundered, market-moving facts. And it does so with little risk of capture because the media works differently from other repositories of ill-begotten product. While banks are legally required to refuse or report sources of dirty money, the media will die to protect those who provide it with information.

I believed then — and do as strongly now — that it is not the job of a reporter to police the motives or morals of their sources. Angels don’t leak. But it is important to understand how much Mystery Men have changed the whole business of information traffic. As a group, they are more prolific than any single source could hope to be. Despite not being involved in any M&A, their tips can be almost comically detailed, running across multiple text screens and spanning everything from deal terms to project code names, timelines and cell phones of the various advisers and executives involved. Being motivated only by making money, they are liberated of the moral and emotional tides that turn within many source-reporter relations. Their information is sometimes spot on, other times nonsense. The Mystery Men don’t care. They are street pushers in a large operation and never long without a new dime-bag of MNPI to provide to the media. I don’t believe they speak to one another. They use burners and nearly always with numbers outside the US. What connects them is that they gain specific intel about M&A and forward it to the media.

It is tougher to quantify how Mystery Men have changed the job of deal reporting, which is an individualised pursuit, where one’s personality has as much a bearing on getting scoops as any combination of tricks or technique. I worry, though, that by providing such protein-rich information, it will gradually erode deal reporters’ ability to forage; when detailed tips arrive in your lap, why bother going out to hunt? Once a reporter gets a tip from a Mystery Man they enter a mirror version of their job, seeking from sources not the fragments to make a story, but taking the story to sources in the hope they’ll confirm a fragment. It can be a confusing and, to me at least, a less enjoyable way of working.

Tactical

A tactical leak is a deliberate one by the owners of the information to precipitate an outcome — and usually one they believe cannot be as well achieved by other means. Common examples include:

• A buyer telling a reporter about a takeover offer to put pressure on the seller.
• A seller telling a reporter about one or several offers to put pressure on buyers.
• A prospective buyer or seller using media coverage to gauge stakeholder (equity investors, regulators, customers etc) appetite for a transaction

In my experience, tactical leaks are rare, requiring a balance of risk appetite and a sophistication about navigating media that is unusual, certainly in public company M&A. Company approved media embargos, dropped shortly before the official announcement, are much more common, but are something else entirely.

There are a million stories I am missing. My own alleged run-in with criminal sources could have been part of this piece. Anyone who wants to read about it can look here or, if you want to see what it’s like when journalists report badly on other journalists, here. There are also many more reasons why people give information to journalists than the ones set out above, obviously. This is just supposed to capture a specific set of motivations that informed much of the story gathering on M&A during the years I reported on it. Sometimes, all comes down to . . . 

Luck

It happens. Every so often, a reporter gets sent an email by mistake or overhears a conversation at a bar or sits next to someone on a train who just can’t resist opening a PowerPoint draft. Or, as happened to me once, goes to a job interview in a different industry and is told about something directly related to a story they are chasing.

The best luck I ever knew of fell to a teammate, who we’ll leave nameless here.

Walking into the office one grey and drizzly morning, he got to the corner of 45th and Lexington Avenue and noticed a heap split of trash bags from which, among coffee grounds and fruit and pizza-y sludge, several stacks of paper spewed. He doesn’t remember exactly what made him go over to look — “I’ve found literally thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff falling out of trash bags. Mostly in Westchester,” he said when I asked him about it to write this piece — but when he did, he noticed that the sheets carried the logo of a Wall Street investment bank.

He arrived in the office with the damp and reeking wad of A4, which, once dried and laid out, proved to be a gold mine in the form of page after page of prospective company sales the bank was pitching to private equity clients. Those were the good times.