Negative on Negative News
Or the Case of the Too Many Articles
Assigned by Benson to investigate the matter, Lee visits Rofano in prison, and discovers that the once-feared gangster has become a meek botanist. Lee then flies to New York, where, posing as an author, he looks up Rofano's clippings at the New York Dispatch newspaper.
It’s scenes like this, like from the 1942 crime movie, Sealed Lips, that got me where I am today. I could be a research nerd and solve crimes. When I started my career in the late 1980’s, though, I did not have to go to the morgue. Already pre-Google, pre-Yahoo, even pre-Alta Vista, there were online databases of newspapers, magazines, and other media. We throw around the term database generally, like I’m gonna do a database search or there was nothing in my databases, but what the invention of the Nexis database (for details on Nexis’s history, try the Wiki) did – what “online databases” do, is twofold. They are both humongous repositories of words and they are amazing systems, ways to go through all those words. Something to search and a way to search it. This is both a blessing and curse.
In the old movies this is how a reporter did a news search. “Marge, call the morgue, see what they have on the Boozinksi murder.” If you did not have a morgue, or a Marge, you might have a library and a microfilm reader. And if you’ve ever done that, you know how much easier it is instead, to get articles on Nexis (or Factiva, the other major online database service). Until you get over a thousand “hits.”
Marge gave you back exactly the articles you needed. Nexis does not. Online searching requires at least two steps – two levels of search. You enter your search terms and get back a group of articles, your hits. Within those hits, you then have to pin-point the articles that really matter. The larger the number of hits, the more work, time, and effort to find the useful articles. That is THE skill in background researching, being the person who figures it out. Who spends the time reading. Who comes up with the handful of relevant articles.
What happens if you run a common name? Or search a moderately large company. The plethora of results can be “noise”; it’s not your Billy Madison; or they can be irrelevant, e.g., er, that’s the point, what does irrelevant mean? What’s the expression, one person’s trash is the next person’s cash. For a lot of research, especially due diligence/background research, the need is not every article but the relevant ones. Mostly, what’s called relevant is what’s called negative news or adverse media.
There are two ways to find limit your searches to negative news. First, you can use a service, such as “Worldcheck” by Refinitiv, which is a curated set of articles focused on negative items. Just like the old newspaper morgue but writ larger. Second, you can screen your research subject against a bunch of words that would show up in articles about bad or important things—fraud, crime, lawsuit, bribery, kickback, etc. Both of these strategies have value, and I personally use both. Still, as the headline to this piece states, I’m negative on negative news.
I lean away from focusing on negative news. Negative news screens can still produce unwieldly amounts of results, hardly solving your hits problem. You also have a problem that not all negative news words work. “Suit” as a search term may find articles about litigation, or it may find articles on poker. More vital, negative news searches may not give all the articles you need. Not all negative news have the ick words. The example I always use, change of management. A company that goes through 3 CFOs in six months. That’s negative. Yet, it’s unlikely that any negative news words will show in these articles. A lot of times, because you have some context provided by your client, only you might realize something is negative. I prefer other tactics to narrow down my searches.
The following are common ways to limit your search results when going through online databases
Selecting publications based on geography
Selecting publications based on type
Newspapers and magazines vs. press releases and similar items
Major publications
Searching for your subject in the headline or lead paragraph
·Looking for articles with more than a certain amount of words.
I’m partial to limiting my results by publications. On Nexis, after your initial search, you can limit the results by publications—if your initial result was not huge, all the publication possibilities will show up in your limitation options, but other times, not each and every publication will be there as an option. Thus, this filter will not work. When it does, it allows you to bypass all the press releases, the earnings announcements, the blah-blah that doesn’t tell you anything. But otherwise, articles are there for you to read and make your own judgment as to their relevance.
What about this – you have hits in publications from all over the world. You know your subject has always lived and worked in one place. You limit your results to that area. Like only newspapers and other regional publications for there. The person, however, while on vacation, went on a bender and did bad things. You might miss that, right?
The answer. Do not use one screen. Try a few. Even try some negative keyword searches. When I say I’m negative on negative news, it’s on the belief that too many people ONLY do negative news screens.
All the time, I say that research is both art and science. Futzing with search terms and search parameters cannot be fully automated. Each case requires a different approach. We have access to so much data. A blessing and a curse. Know how to handle it.