Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Dave Kansas Out at Dow Jones-IAC Finance Site FiLife

FiLife, the personal finance site co-owned by IAC (IACI) and Dow Jones, has a new boss. The company has brought in Ezra Kucharz, formerly an executive at online games company Oberon Media and at NBC’s iVillage, as president.

He replaces Dave Kansas, a business news veteran. Kansas will stay on as an editor-at-large and has a personal finance book due out in January.

FiLife, which is supposed to be geared toward young folks who spend more time browsing the Web than looking at their 401(k), has had a short but troubled existence. It finally launched in June, after more than a year of fits and starts. It was originally supposed to have lots of blog-like entries from professional writers, and eventually moved into a more service-oriented comparison shopping engine for financial products.

You could argue that economic turmoil could make a site like this particularly valuable for its target audience, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Compare the performance of the site with Consumerist.com, a Gawker Media blog that’s now up for sale.

Full disclosure: Dow Jones is a unit of News Corp. (NWS), which also owns this Web site. If you’d like even more disclosure, see here.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik