If a lender can easily obtain more information about a borrower, under what conditions will he choose to do so? In this paper, I use a hand-collected set of records from the nineteenth century credit reporting agency, R.G. Dun & Company, that allows me to directly observe when lenders acquired information about their borrowers. I find evidence that lenders did not always seek information even though it was inexpensive and easily available. Instead, lenders were more likely to start accessing the reports for a borrower after they heard bad news, be it aggregate or borrower-specific. These results show that lenders require relatively more information about borrowers during an economic downturn, suggesting that information constraints likely play a more important role in credit market outcomes during these times. Furthermore, lenders responded to bad news about a borrower in their loan portfolio by acquiring information about other borrowers. This result sheds light on how one default can affect the larger credit network through contagious information acquisition.