Business of Journalism Is Still Ill-Suited for Business Journalists [Media]

[KiRby]

Dave Kansas, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com, is out as the president of personal finance site FiLife.com, [I]Portfolio[/I] reports. Kansas will keep a title with FiLife, but it'll be as "editor at large." And given his connections to the WSJ newsroom, we wouldn't be surprised to see him land back there eventually. But Kansas is a reminder that journalists — especially reporters on media and financial beats are particularly prone to thinking they could do a better job than the folks who handle the money in the business—the only people, it seems, who stand any chance of getting rich.
This syndrome is partly occupational hazard, since reporters and editors spend so much time talking to real business people who like to flatter with effusions of how brilliant and right on their analyses are. No one has been more of a poster-boy for the yearning to cross the editorial-managment divide than Kansas, who signed up in 1999 with Jim Cramer at TheStreet.com first with an editorial tile and then more venerated monikers like Executive Vice President and Chief Strategic Officer. At one point, his stock in the company was worth $9 million, but even more importantly it was the sort of gig that could position him for management positions down the line. But the dot-com crash wiped out the paper money and Kansas was soon back at the WSJ again, editing stuff. Last year he left again to run FiLife, taking the title of president. We can't blame him for trying to make the jump: editorial employees are being laid off left and right, and even the superstars in the field are looking burnt out and less special every day. Maybe next boom, eh?

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