There’s a profile in today’s New York Times on the world’s foremost Bachelor spoiler authority. Perhaps some of you didn’t even know the world had a foremost Bachelor spoiler authority. I know I didn’t. But it does, and it’s 40-year-old Texan Stephen Carbone, proprietor of the website RealitySteve.com. Big day for all of us, really.
Anyway, the profile charts exactly how one becomes the world’s foremost Bachelor spoiler authority, and it turns out, interestingly enough, that the first step in that process appears to be getting fired by ESPN for cussing in a column on an ESPN Radio website. Because that’s what Carbone did, which led to plenty of downtime in the early 2000s, which led to him watching lots of Joe Millionaire, which led to lots of goofy emails about the show to his friends, which — after turning the emails into a popular newsletter and receiving inside information about reality show plot points that had been filmed but had not aired — led to the creation of the aforementioned RealitySteve.com. And thanks to his steady pipeline of spoilers about The Bachelor (for example, he’s already posted who wins the season that doesn’t even start airing until next Monday), Carbone is doing pretty, pretty well down there in Texas.
RealitySteve.com is combination love letter, cruel tease and cat-and-mouse game — one man working against a huge operation. Mr. Carbone’s writing is characterized by equal parts skepticism and glee: The site’s header reads, “My slanted, sophomoric, and skewed view on the world of reality television.”
It’s a small outfit — he employs a webmaster who also organizes his ad sales, but otherwise, all the labor is Mr. Carbone’s, earning him what he terms a “comfortable” six-figure income.
From fired by ESPN for cussing to making six figures spoiling a reality show about a dude looking for a wife by making out with dozens of women in a jacuzzi. Greatest country in the world.
(Via NY Times)
