2 Sources Teach You A Funny Thing About Human Nature

Imagine you're a football coach and you've got a set of killer plays that you know are going to help you win big. Now imagine you call up a journalist and tell them, in highly specific detail, every single one of those plays. Now imagine the slapstick boing sound that will play when the camera pans onto you as your team limps home after a crushing defeat.

If you become a journalist, chances are you won't have to imagine a situation like that, because some sources fall head over tits to be that coach.

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One time, a country in the Middle East was looking to raise billions of dollars. The whole way this works is through semi-secrecy. Until the last possible moment, no borrower country wants to let the people lending it money know exactly how much it wants, or how much it can afford to pay, or exactly when it will try to raise the money, because if it does, then the potential lenders will twist the screws to make sure they can get as big a return as possible.

This didn't stop one government official telling me, on condition of personal anonymity but well aware I had a duty to report what he said, exactly all of these details in the week before he was planning on asking for a huge amount of money. The financial markets reacted accordingly when the story was published, and the country had to cough up a few hundred thousand dollars extra each time it pays interest until the debt is gone.

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In my old life as a general news reporter, I had a property developer tell me that he was trying to get planning permission to build a new bar in the middle of a residential district. People generally don't want to put their kids to sleep while listening to thumping bass and drunks puking in the parking lot, so when the story broke, they complained. A lot. As a result, the bar never happened. "I didn't think you were going to publish it!" the developer shouted down the phone at me -- having called me a day earlier, completely out of the blue and having never met me before, and having explicitly been told I would publish what he said.