SeanReadsTheNews

AP Unemployment Porn: Man Makes Living Suing Spammers

Paul Elias of The Associated Press finds a hilarious little story of unemployment porn - Daniel Balsam making a six-figure living suing spammers for targeting him with illegal messages.

Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.

Elias found in Balsam someone using an inherent weakness of our legal system for productive purposes.  Harassment in court that would be just wrong when conducted against an honest business seems perfectly fair when engaged in against e-mail marketing companies.

The writer does give the targets a chance to respond, and they hew closely to what message points I'd put forward if one of these companies were my client as well.

"There is nothing wrong per se with being an anti-spam crusader," said Kelley, who has sued Balsam twice for allegedly violating confidentiality terms in settlement agreements. "But Dan abuses the processes by using small claims court.

"A lot of people will settle with him to avoid the hassle," Kelley said.

That said, these guys wrote the book on hassle and it seems like this is one example where doing everything correctly, PR-wise, can't help because the facts are just bad.

Personally, we're waiting for the spam message that tells us we can earn a six-figure income working from home by suing spammers.  The universe owes us this.

 

Forbes on Dropout Poker Champ

My subheading of unemployment porn -- or reporting on unrealistic career paths as a solution to our unemployment problem - doesn't get much of a workout.  When I launched it I was expecting more entries.  Every now and then, I do spot one and that was the case yesterday when Nathan Vardi of Forbes reporting on a dropout poker champion.

For Jonathan Duhamel, the road to riches meant dropping out of a finance degree program at the University of Quebec in Montreal to concentrate on playing poker. The move paid off recently when, at the age of 23, Duhamel won the World Series of Poker’s main event and the $8.9 million prize that went with it.

Ok, dropping out of business school isn't the same thing as dropping out of high school, and Forbes was using his story as an excuse to write about finance and poker, not giving unemployment advice but it still glamorizes professional gambling.  Which, come to think of it, also makes this a Signature Story for Forbes.

I have a friend who is a competitive poker player who told me that since the hold-em craze of the 1990s "the dead money isn't dead any more" -- that the folks the pros used to take down with ease have gotten so sharp from online practice that they are actually competitive, which has upended the traditionally small field of champions.

The article also indulges in what I might call private equity porn - his parents made $90,000 by staking him part of the tournaments $10,000 entrance fee.

Duhamel’s parents have now accepted his decision. So have his friends. One of them, who is studying to become a high school teacher, pulled off  a great trade by contributing $100 to Duhamel’s $10,000 entrance fee for the World Series of Poker. Duhamel recently paid his buddy his cut of the winnings: $90,000. PokerStars, the world’s biggest online poker site, also made a good bet by sponsoring Duhamel on the eve of the World Series of Poker.

It's a fun story with multiple messages, perfect for Forbes.com's high class link troll model.

Eve Tahmincioglu on the Entreprenuer Myth

Eve Tahmincioglu of MSNBC.com blogs today about the idea that all the laid-off people out there should just start their own businesses, and how stupid an idea that would be.

I’ve been getting lots of emails lately from readers who keeping hearing all this entrepreneurship hype and figure they should look into it. But too often they tell me they have no idea what to sell. Some ask me what I think and want me to suggest a product or service. This is probably a big sign you probably won’t make it as a business owner because you need to be at least a little bit passionate about a product or service if you’re going to make a go of it.

I see a parallel between the idea that everyone should own their own company with the idea that everyone should own their own house.  It just isn't true and attempts to subsidize, browbeat, or seduce everyone into starting businesses will end just as badly as attempts to turn 100% of Americans into homeowners did.

Eve is a paternalist when it comes to jobs - her other writings strongly suggest that she sees owners and employees as two different creatures and always sides with employees when those two get into fights.  So it makes sense that she wouldn't want everyone to be a boss - but she is correct that entrepreneurship is not for everyone.

Basically, she's exposing a particularly broad and insidious form of unemployment porn, and good for her.

 

NYT's Carr on the Success of TheAwl

David Carr of The New York Times uses his column today to write a little unemployment porn for journalists.  You know that crazy site you started with your friends when the newspaper you worked for reorganized?  It might lead to a sustainable living!

Rather than hiring writers and building out various verticals that are then federated into a business, The Awl is finding specific writers it likes and then going into partnership with them. Splitsider is partly owned by Adam Frucci, who used to work at Gawker Media’s gadget blog, Gizmodo, and The Hairpin’s partner will be Edith Zimmerman, most recently of New York magazine’s Vulture blog.

The very idea of a little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales. The Awl is attempting to tunnel under those efforts by building a low-cost site that delivers a certain kind of content for a certain kind of audience. And the owners don’t have to get rich — The Awl has no investors — they just have to eat.

That's the way these kinds of businesses should work - but never seem to.  Carr has captured the perfect story for expressing how unpredictable start-up businesses are, even in an era where digital technology makes the costs of trying lower than ever in history.

 

What's In Business News: Yesterday and Today

Today in particular was a really interesting day for business news but again a bad day for writing full posts so here's another bulleted list of the good stuff.

• Paul LaMonica of CNNMoney's The Buzz writes about why merger mania is back.  He goes to the familiar explanation that company's finally had to do something with all that cash, getting his usual mix of insightful interviews, broad-based market analysis and arched eyebrow.
• Chris Isidore of CNNMoney is surprised that manufacturing is coming back, in a Halley's Comet of a story.  The reality is that it never really went away so whenever a reporter wants to write about it coming back, there it is.  The Wall Street Journal tried to start a series on this last year but got bored after about four installments.
• Jayne O'Donnell of USA Today writes on a scandal that's hardly surprising.  It turns out that if you spend $10 to see famous people give you motivational speeches, they will try to sell you something more expensive at the same time.  Is anyone really surprised by this?  This is a scoop right up there with exploding the lid off high-pressure sales tactics at time share presentations.
• On the other hand, kudos to Larry Copeland of USA Today for being among the first to report that the Institute for Highway Safety has found that bans on texting while driving actually increase accidents where they are in effect.  Personally, I can't imagine ever doing that but apparently it's more dangerous to make people afraid to be caught.
• Felix Gillette of BusinessWeek reports on comedians who found fame after their TV show was cancelled by doing videos on YouTube instead.  They've turned it into a profitable business they control, rather than the networks.  It's too heartwarming to be considered unemployment porn - but even mentioning porn out of context raises my hit count so there it is.  Read this one.
• Finally, another great story by JP Mangalindan of Fortune, this time on TimeLife Books and how they are still selling expensive media collections on late night TV delivered on archaic disks and tapes.  It was a story just sitting there begging to be written.  I had so much fun reading it, I'm going to give it an excerpt.
  • Care for that Patsy Cline box collection in your iTunes? Too bad. There are no digital downloads -- only CD and DVD sets sent via snail mail. There are no alternative methods of payment like BillMeLater or even PayPal, either -- just credit cards. It's as if all the technological advancements of the past decade never happened.
• Mangalindan interviews the folks who own the company now (sold by Time Inc. to PE investors in 2003) and they respond that they selling aging products to an aging demographic that still prefers its stuff on hard media.  It's a really funny, but also interesting story about the last holdout in a business that has largely transitioned away from its model.  Very interesting stuff.

WaPo: College Graduates Prosper in Skilled Trades

Articles asking "Is college worth it?" are rapidly moving from Halley's Comet to Nascar status in the nation's business press as costs continue to rise and value continues to fall.

Carol Morello of The Washington Post sets out to interview college graduates who decided to opt out of office jobs and work with their hands as carpenters, electricians and plumbers, finding that they often have just as easy a time reaching the middle class.

They started out studying aerospace engineering, creative writing and urban planning. But somewhere on the path to accumulating academic credentials, they decided that working with their hands sounded more pleasant -- and lucrative -- than a lot of white-collar work. So bye-bye to term papers and graduate theses, and hello to apprenticeships to become plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and carpenters.

For Osielski, the attraction was natural. After graduating from Notre Dame, he spent two years in Haiti working with a charity building schools, but he wasn't allowed to do the one task that seemed most intriguing: wiring the electricity.

While this article might not qualify as unemployment porn*  for the actual graduates, it probably does for every parent of a comparative religion major who is now sleeping on the couch in the living room.

It's not a new idea - "I should have sent the kid to electrician's school" was the punchline of an early Doonesbury strip in the 1970s - but the current examples demonstrate that today's young people are facing the realities of the job market with clear heads and an ability to evaluate their options and seek the best path.

* My term of art for articles about the job market that use case studies of unlikely success as examples of how to succeed.

NYT Salutes Snopes.com

Brian Stelter of The New York Times today profiles the often-profiled David and Barbara Mikkelson, the two researchers behind urban-legend debunker Snopes.com, one of my favorite Internet success stories.

For well over a decade they have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question posed by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

Stelter uses the article as a way to show how all those annoying scam e-mails start making the rounds, and how the Mikkelsons go about sorting out fact from fiction. 

Truth be told, there isn't much in this version of the story that hasn't been in earlier articles about them but it's a valuable resource and it's very cool that something they just started doing as a hobby because they loved it turned into their job.

Less than a year later, Snopes became the family’s full-time job. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — “despite rumors that we’re paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee,” Mr. Mikkelson said.

He points out that to be successful, they had to follow their audience and do more investigations of political claims when they were really more interested in "where's my kidney" type urban legend e-mails at the outset. 

Unemployment Porn: Joining Your Spouse's Business

Beth Kowitt's article in Fortune today on a laid-off lighting executive who joined his wife's business is the latest entry in my "unemployment porn," category, articles on career paths that make good stories but don't represent a real solution to joblessness for most people.

These days the suburban Atlanta resident, 55, is a vice president again, but his business card now reads Vice President of Everything for McLeod & More -- the operation of author and motivational speaker Lisa Earle McLeod, his wife.

He handles everything from bookings to corporate pitches, and he's also her first read. "She can't spell for squat," he jokes. When Lisa gives a speech -- one of 50 a year -- McLeod is in the back of the room selling her books. "I don't have a bit of a problem with that," he says.

Most solo businesses of that type don't provide the stability or income of a corporate job and won't be an option, although Kowitt does have some nice storytelling about how the couple balances work and family.

On a related note, Micheal Hartman of NPR's Marketplace radio show has a segment today on people who have formed companies because they can't find jobs elsewhere, so-called "necessity entrepreneurs."

That's Cameron Morgan, her musician boyfriend. About a year ago he started an online record store in their basement. It sells vintage vinyl and electric-guitar accessories, including one he helped invent.

It's always great to see people chase their dreams and succeed, particularly since so much coverage of the recession calls for more welfare and government interference in business investment, but I doubt we're doing to solve a 10% unemployment problem by forming music companies in basements.

Reuters, Forbes on Millionare Dropouts

Two remarkably similar articles popped today from Forbes and Reuters on dropouts who made it big.  I'm going to slot this into my "Unemployment Porn" section as another example of the business media highlighting career strategies that don't make sense for most people.

Reuters' Jon Cook's blog post is on college dropouts and is illustrated with famous dropout Bill Gates getting an honorary degree.

Like Zuckerberg, Gates also went to Harvard. Page and Yang both attended Stanford. Jobs only completed one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Dell left the University of Texas at 19. Geffen dropped out of three universities before launching his record label. Lauren went to little-known Baruch College in New York State, but left after two years. Branson, a mild dyslexic, never made it out of high school. And it’s not clear if Ford founder Henry Ford ever had any formal education, outside his training as a machinist.

Helen Coster of Forbes.com entertained that site's penchant for mixing business news with celebrity photos, including rap stars and models in her list.  Here list is limited to high school drop outs, which makes the pool shallower, in more ways than one.

When Bundchen was 14 years old a modeling scout discovered her in a Brazilian shopping mall. In 1996 she debuted at Fashion Week in New York City. She earned $25 million last year, thanks to contracts with Versace, Dior ( CHDRF.PK - news - people ) and other companies. She also has a line of sandals called Ipanema by Gisele.

These articles can also be seen as cautionary tales - if you're a genius or an otherworldly beauty, you'll know by the time you're 20.  If you are older than that and aren't on this path, you probably aren't one.

Unemployment Portn: Can American Restore the Economy With Baked Goods and Tag Sales?

Jilian Mincer contributes a column on how to make extra money during a recession in today's Wall Street Journal that manages to provide no surprising ideas about how to do so as well as hanging out extreme outliers as examples of an economic roadmap.

I coined the term "unemployment porn," for these kinds of articles a month or two back and it has led to interesting follower interest in my Twitter feed.

A Mom who tried to sell her pies to neighbors who now owns a bakery, a lawyer who wanted to sell her kids old video games and how runs a $7 million e-commerce site, are highlighted alongside people renting out their spare rooms and holding tag sales.

Taking online polls and tying to get paid for tasks that are usually favors like watching a neighbors kids after school round out the article.

Taking the night shift at the Quick Check must have been cut in editing.