Well looky here. When we opened up our Wall Street Journal on Monday, April 13, we saw something we thought had gone the way of the sock puppet: a deal announcement that had been handed to the Journal ahead of its release to the rest of the media.

The story, which ran on the top of page B1, told of Express Scripts Inc.'s agreement to buy WellPoint Inc.'s in-house pharmacy benefits management business, NextRx, for $4.68 billion and had all the markings of a classic "strategic placement." Completely devoid of quotes from anyone beyond the two merger partners, it included a full rundown of the deal's terms and details, sourced to "the companies."

It seems The New York Times had caught wind of the deal, which was foreshadowed six weeks earlier by the Financial Times when it reported that WellPoint would hold an auction for its pharmacy benefits management business. The Times' April 13 edition reported that Express Scripts was "close to acquiring" the WellPoint unit for about $4.7 billion, according to "people briefed on the talks" who spoke to the paper on Sunday. But a spokeswoman for WellPoint told the Times that "the company did not comment on rumors or speculation." We can only assume "the company" was too busy handing the story to the Journal.

So here we are again. Media Maneuvers has always been obsessed with strategic placements, going back to the early years of the decade, when the Journal rode them to deal scoop dominance. But as the merger boom sputtered and many of the era's biggest deals revealed themselves to be duds, strategic placements came in for a drubbing, with groups including Ralph Nader's Commercial Alert complaining about selective disclosure of merger news.

The charge was simple: Placements, by their very nature, ensure prominent, positive, or at least noncritical, deal coverage, since no reporter is going to want to bite the hand that's feeding him by injecting skepticism into an "exclusive" piece.

The brouhaha faded with the merger boom, but when the deal markets returned a few years later, strategic placements, for the most part, did not return with them. With more and more news outlets, including blogs, training their eyes on mergers and acquisitions, keeping a deal under wraps until it could be "placed" became more difficult.

At the same time, media scrutiny was rising. Indeed, when American Pharmaceutical Partners Inc. handed the Journal an exclusive on its plans to acquire its largest shareholder, American BioScience Inc., in 2005, the paper came clean about what it gave up in return for the largesse: its ability to report. "Dr. Soon-Shiong [executive chairman of American Pharma and chief executive of American BioScience] disclosed details of the transaction to The Wall Street Journal under the condition that the newspaper contact no one else about the deal in order to prevent leaks to investors," the paper fessed up. "As a result, it is unclear how shareholders, who could see their stakes diluted, would fare under the deal."

The Journal's Express Scripts story contained no such admissions. And unlike the American Pharma deal, Express Scripts' transaction was greeted warmly by the market, with both companies' shares rising on the news. Still, we can't help but wonder if the Express Scripts scoop is a harbinger of deal placements to come. If it is, it's an interesting time for their return. The media -- particularly the financial media -- has been on the hot seat for months for failing to warn the world that financial Armageddon was approaching, with everyone from Jon Stewart to the worthies at Columbia Journalism School chiming in.

Most of the critics fault the business press for being too close to the subjects they cover and for acting as cheerleaders for Wall Street and its denizens. Against that backdrop, forfeiting the right to report in exchange for a leak from a dealmaker may not be such a wise bargain for news outlets to make.

Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.