Today, Crain’s Chicago Business followed on my post about the Deloitte trading scandal. Steve Daniels advanced the story a bit, here are the relevant portions:
[Flanagan was] lead partner over his career on major accounts including Sears Holdings Corp. and Walgreen Co….major Chicago companies, including Walgreen, Northbrook-based Allstate Corp. and Chicago-based USG Corp., disclosed in recent filings that Deloitte had informed them of trades in securities related to them by a “former advisory partner.”
….The timing of [one] deal corresponds to Walgreen’s $850-million acquisition of Buffalo Grove-based pharmacy services firm Option Care Inc., announced July 2, 2007.
In a recent filing, Deerfield-based Walgreen says, “Deloitte believes the former advisory partner engaged in trading in (Walgreen’s) stock, or options related thereto, as well as common stock, or options related thereto, issued by Option Care Inc., which was acquired by the company in 2007.”
A spokesman for Walgreen confirms that Mr. Flanagan is the “advisory partner” referred to in the filing.
Now, ordinarily, I’d say: great job, you unearthed some new details. But Crain’s claims it was SecuritiesDocket.com that first broke the news. That is dead wrong: Courthouse News Service reported it first (which SecuritiesDocket acknowledges).
What bothers me more than this little error is that Daniels neglects to admit what is obvious: this is a follow of my story. Is Steve Daniels really going to tell me he’s known about this case since two obscure legal/financial publications mentioned it a week ago, and he just happened to publish a story today, 24 hours after my story ran on a prominent Chicago Web site? Hard to swallow. Even the most charitable version would have Daniels working on a story, and having his editors make him publish it today because my story came out.
In journalism, it’s common courtesy to offer a little tip of the hat (as I did to Courthouse News in my post) to those who came before. SecuritiesDocket even highlighted the new details uncovered in my post, after the fact. Instead, Daniels buries the credit halfway into the story — and gets it wrong. This is so typical of the Crain’s attitude of “We are the only business publication that matters in Chicago, you shall all bow down to us.” That would be a semi-reasonable sentiment if their reporting weren’t so sloppy. You’d think that by cutting back on investigations and features in order to focus on breaking news, they might actually break news. Instead, they’re following someone like me, who admittedly knows very little about the Big Four and doesn’t focus on scoops at all.
I don’t blame the Crain’s reporters, though. How can they be expected to do good journalism when they’re forced to rewrite press releases and compile lists?
1 Comment
November 7, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Kudos to you, Ryan, for running this story down. As I wrote in my most recent story on Securities Docket, yours was the first major publication to examine this:
http://www.securitiesdocket.com/2008/11/07/further-details-on-deloitte-v-thomas-p-flanagan/
As I also wrote today at Compliance Week, this continues to be the Lowest-Profile High-Profile case I’ve seen in a long while:
http://www.complianceweek.com/blog/carton/2008/11/07/the-lowest-profile-high-profile-case/