Beware of Media Hustler Steven Brill; "Clear Lanes" Fails

(MoneyWatch)  Late last night, a curt message was posted FlyClear's website:

"Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available.

"At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear's parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations."

That's too bad, you may say, but what has this to do with the media industry?

Two words: Steven Brill.

As Peter Kafka points out at his blog hosted by the Wall Street Journal, the clear lane operation to speed frequent travelers through those irritating airport security lines had raised a hefty $116 million in funding since 2005, including over $44 million last year from Twitter's major backer, Spark Capital. The company also had attracted 165,000 customers who paid an annual fee of $128 each.

That comes to a tidy $20 million+ in annual revenue for the young company. But all of this cash was apparently not enough to allow the start-up to avoid shutting down quite early in its promising young life. So let's look behind the money to see who was responsible.

Two words: Steven Brill.

Brill is a serial entrepreneur who likes to spend other people's money. He was the founder and CEO of Clear until he left the company in April. His next venture? Journalism Online (JO!), which instantly provoked me to write: "The Brill Solution For Paid Content -- Not.

At least the clear card concept was a good one. JO! is nothing more than an attempt to reinvent wheels like PayPal and Amazon that don't need to be reinvented for handling a pay wall, which is itself the dumb idea, behind this whole venture, but whatever.

Recently, Brill wormed his way into that so-called "secret" meeting of newspaper execs and their antitrust lawyers, trying to hawk his worn-out JO! concept, which of course is better known as a wooden staff used in martial arts in Japan.

Memo to the newspaper industry: The fox is inside your henhouse! Beware of Brill and his wooden club!
Come to think of it, if these executives are so dumb as to give their money to a hustler of Brill's ilk, maybe they deserve to go out of business.

Thanks to Ken Newman for alerting me to this story.