USA Today

From CaseyPedia

USA Today is a paper whose content is sometimes referred to as "McNews", due to its homogonization of events.

USA Today is a newspaper that was founded by Al Neuharth in 1982. The paper has a sterling reputation for reporting the news in a matter of fact, non-partisan way. They are one of the few Mainstream Media outlets that is willing to print stories that deal with issues the cable and network media will not cover. The paper refers to itself as "America's Newspaper".

Recently, they have done many articles on the continuing housing crash and, as such, the paper has written articles chronicling Casey Serin and quoting award-winning real estate broker, Nigel "It's Pleather, Bay-bee" Swaby.

[edit] "10 Mistakes That Made Flipping A Flop"

USA Today was the first major media outlet to cover the IAFF story. In October 2006, calling Serin "the poster child for everything that went wrong in the real estate boom," they laid out Serin's many mistakes and introduced the country to his website.

The rise and fall of Casey Serin is a tale with moral and financial lessons for real estate buyers, lenders and regulators. Having consumed real estate guides and seminars, Serin made just about every mistake a newbie could make — most of them, he admits, were no one's fault but his own — from fudging loan applications to buying homes sight-unseen.^[1]

The USA Today article also noted IAFF's polarized audience, noting that it draws "both notes of condolence and expletive-laced condemnation" The article introduced many more Haterz™ and Supporterz™ to Serin's excruciating ordeal.

Serin considered the coverage "sweet media" and described it as "pretty accurate coverage". He used it to taunt Haterz™ who had claimed that IAFF was a fake: "This is for all you ~~haters~~ critics out there who still think I am running a scam blog. [...] I’m the real deal. This is no scam." and went on to justify himself:

My primary goal for publicizing my 'screw ups' on this blog has always been to help people. Help both regular home-owners facing foreclosure and newbie investors/flippers like me who got in over their head. That’s my target audience. I have already heard lots of positive feedback from other distressed sellers/owners. I guess, I’m doing something right!^[2]

While the exposure helped to build traffic for IAFF, it has never helped Casey become the guru he had hoped it would make him.

[edit] "Many Investors Feel Like Running Away From Homes"

In June 2007, USA Today quoted Jamaican bobsled team "19th alternate" Nigel Swaby in an article on the real-estate decline:

Others, like Nigel Swaby, a 36-year-old mortgage broker in Salt Lake City, are reluctant stock investors. Fearing the prices on two investment properties he owned in Salt Lake City could decline, he sold them in 2005 and invested the money in stocks. Swaby wants to get back into real estate and has been hunting for homes to buy, but feels prices are still too inflated. "There aren't a ton of deals out there," he says. So his money sits in a high-yield savings account, a diversified stock mutual fund and four stocks: Procter & Gamble, Nortel Networks, Revlon and United Airlines. "I want a higher rate of return than a savings account, and stocks are it, until the real estate opportunity presents itself.^[3]

Many Haterz™ saw this as a confirmation of Swaby's "do what I say, not what I do" approach to real estate, in which he continually tries to drum up business through reality-denying "the market's fine, come on in" posts on his pleather-ific Salt Lake City Real Estate Blog while himself avoiding any investment in real estate.

After the story appeared, Swaby posted at SLCRE to rant against his mistrust of the mainstream media and how, in his opinion, they "twist facts to create a story." Although he admitted that the quotes were verbatim and untwisted, he believes he was misrepresented and accused the USA Today reporter: "This is not a case of a hyperbolic headline, this is a case of an out and out lie."^[4]

Exurban Nation posted a critique of Swaby's blog post where the Haterz™ consensus was: much ado about nothing.^[5]

Despite his reservations about the story, Swaby none-the-less leveraged the coverage to rebrand SLCRE as a "nationally recognized blog".