Dave Kansas, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com, is out as the president of personal finance site FiLife.com, Portfolio reports. Kansas will keep a title with FiLife, but it'll be as "editor at large." And given his connections to the WSJ newsroom, we wouldn't be surprised to see him land back there eventually. But Kansas is a reminder that journalists — especially reporters on media and financial beats — are particularly prone to thinking they could do a better job than the folks who handle the money in the business—the only people, it seems, who stand any chance of getting rich.This syndrome is partly occupational hazard, since reporters and editors spend so much time talking to real business people who like to flatter with effusions of how brilliant and right on their analyses are. No one has been more of a poster-boy for the yearning to cross the editorial-managment divide than Kansas, who signed up in 1999 with Jim Cramer at TheStreet.com first with an editorial tile and then more venerated monikers like Executive Vice President and Chief Strategic Officer. At one point, his stock in the company was worth $9 million, but even more importantly it was the sort of gig that could position him for management positions down the line. But the dot-com crash wiped out the paper money and Kansas was soon back at the WSJ again, editing stuff. Last year he left again to run FiLife, taking the title of president. We can't blame him for trying to make the jump: editorial employees are being laid off left and right, and even the superstars in the field are looking burnt out and less special every day. Maybe next boom, eh?

FiLife, a personal-finance site backed by IAC and the Wall Street Journal, is struggling, according to one ex-employee we eavesdropped on at the City Bakery, a coffeehouse in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, as she interviewed for a new job. "The business model completely changed," she said. "It used to be personal finance for people in their 20s and 30s. Now it's just completely pointless." An embittered writer? Perhaps. FiLife hired a batch of journalists, only to switch gears shortly before launch and realize that the Web didn't need another content site. But their replacement — a set of automated tools to evaluate one's place in the financial pecking order — do seem pointless. The site only attracts 31,500 users a month. In this regard, FiLife is utterly typical — of both its backer and its genre.IAC CEO Barry Diller has a ghastly track record of launching projects in-house; almost every vaguely promising Internet property he owns, he bought from someone else: Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and so on. And personal finance sites are deadly. In trying to break the mold, FiLife managed to be even more condescending than most. Its introduction:

AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young.