On September 15th, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, turning thousands more bankers into job-seekers, I received a call from a producer at Inside Edition, and a town car arrived at my sister’s house in Larchmont to whisk me to the mid-town television studio for an interview in response to the collapse. It struck me as absurd how at the same time I was penniless and sleeping on my sister’s couch, I was being whisked by a town car to a television studio in New York City. The show was broadcast nationally—and my phone rang non-stop for days.
One of the most exciting calls I received was from an acquaintance—Sharon Gitelle—whom I had not seen since high school. She worked at Forbes.com and invited me to join the “recently launched community of the high quality business and financial bloggers—the Forbes Business and Financial Blog Network.”
I had started a blog only a month and a half before—more about that later—and already I was receiving a blogging seal of approval!
As a result of the Lehman collapse and the worsening financial crisis, as the poster boy for Wall Street, I was subsequently interviewed by news teams representing major Finnish, Belgian and Japanese TV networks—and I conducted off-camera interviews with journalists from Reuters and a German newspaper Rheinische Post.
I was definitely having more success with the media than with my job search. As the summer slipped away, I was getting far more offers for media interviews than for job interviews. I wasn’t getting paid for all the publicity, but the tremendous interest in my story was an indication that I was doing something right—and it was a sign of great things to come.
Comments