Ann Arbor-based ShareSleuth profiled in Wired Magazine

Chris Carey works from his Ann Arbor bungalow on ShareSlueth, a website devoted to investigative reporting on publicly-traded stocks that is owned by Mark Cuban. Cue controversy.

Excerpt:

In a yellow bungalow in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Carey is pecking away at his keyboard in his tiny home office, surrounded by piles of files. It's located on a typical college- town block, right down to a laissez-faire attitude governing home and garden that tolerates crabgrass, peeling paint, and cluttered front porches. A line of black carpenter ants streams up the wall. Carey doesn't seem to notice.

Tall and balding with pale blue eyes, Carey is shy and cerebral. Ask him a question and he pauses, tilts his head, and responds cautiously — like a tax lawyer appearing before the IRS. On hot summer days, Carey swelters (there's no air-conditioning) and sometimes splurges on lunch at a local deli to enjoy an hour of AC. A little maroon Corolla sits in his driveway. The rent for his combined home and office: $1,500 a month. "I'm pretty frugal," he says.

In other words, he is an odd partner for the profane Mark Cuban, who spends his free time screaming at NBA officials. The two met via email in 2005, while Carey was on leave from the Post-Dispatch. Carey had worked at newspapers since 1983, when he graduated from Indiana University and took a job at the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Kentucky. Over the next two decades, he hopped to the Orlando Sentinel, the Indianapolis Star, and eventually the Post-Dispatch, where he wrote a highly regarded series on global stock fraud in June 2004. Those stories, he says, helped him win a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Ann Arbor was a welcome break for Carey.

Read the entire article here.


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