A Brief History of Jake Dobkin

I've long been a fan of Gothamist: in my very first BlogWars posting, I anointed Jen Chung Queen of the Blogosphere, with a superior site to Gawker and The Kicker. A few days later, in BlogWars III, I said that "amateurs like Low Culture, Gothamist and even MemeFirst [are] keeping up with the pros like Gawker and The Kicker" – drawing a distinction between amateur and professional blogs.

The distinction's still there, but Gothamist, along with its publisher, Jake Dobkin, has now clearly moved from the amateur to the professional side of the dividing line. And with its new status comes new problems. As I noted on MemeFirst,

It's an expectations game: people don't mind when an amateur blogger goes on holiday, say, or posts infrequently when their day job starts making bigger demands on their time. Gawker and Weblogsinc can't get away with that. They're held to a higher standard.

Part of that higher standard is that the publishers of the websites in question become spokesmen for the whole blogging protoindustry. Jason Calacanis is a master of the art of rustling up publicity, but even he's not half as good as Nick Denton, who's probably had more stuff written about him than he's actually published.

Calacanis and Denton have long had a public rivalry, snarking at each other from their respective weblogs and keeping us all guessing as to how much they like or hate each other. Jake Dobkin, on the other hand, was generally seen as more of an amateur: while Calacanis and Denton both ran dotcom-era hot properties in their day, Dobkin is a fresh graduate from NYU biz school, while his resumé features mainly web design and information architecture work.

In the past couple of months, however, Gothamist has started growing like topsy. For most of its existence it was essentially a single weblog written by Jen Chung; now, says Dobkin, "the Gothamist collective has only twenty writers" (my emphasis).

That line comes from Dobkin's latest trolling expedition, but first a bit of background. Gothamist first started expanding with Gothamist Events, an absolutely wonderful what's-on guide which never really got the publicity or the praise that it deserves. Then came the Gothamist Interview (if you're talking to Jake), aka the Young Manhattanite Interview (if you're talking to Andrew Krucoff). Pretty soon, the spin-offs were coming thick and fast: Gothamist Weather, Ask Gothamist, Gothamist Sports; even Chicagoist. More are certain to come.

Somewhere along the line, Gothamist stopped being just another New York blog, and started being a proper business which was competing directly with Gawker. The Interview, for instance, got high praise from Nick Denton, who has said that he thinks it's a great feature and wishes he'd launched it rather than Dobkin.

All that was missing was for Dobkin to start taking potshots at Denton and Calacanis from his personal site, like those two have been doing for a while now. But Bluejake is a photolog, not suited for such things, and jacobdobkin.com isn't even a weblog. So he used Gothamist instead. The move wasn't unprecedented: he'd already dipped his toes into the water with a long post entitled "Gothamist Notes 1: What Not to Do When You Blog".

But it was only this month, with an entry entitled "Blogertisements!" that Dobkin really threw his gauntlet down and started taking on the Denton-Calacanis axis directly. Nike had decided to launch a website called Art of Speed, and publicise it with a weblog published by Gawker. Dobkin was not impressed – although he did sell an ad for Art of Speed to Nike, which can still be seen between the fourth and fifth posts on the Gothamist home page. In his Blogertisements post, Dobkin kept the tone relatively light and fluffy, but still called Denton "unspeakably devilish", said the blog "isn't too different from writing the text on the back of a cereal box", and used words like "contaminate".

Then, today, Dobkin ratcheted the rhetoric up another couple of notches, with a pretty blistering entry entitled "Calacanis Jumps the Shark?". Go there now, and you'll be presented with all manner of caveats and we-don't-really-mean-its, most of which weren't there originally. But even so, you'll still find some very sharp language: Dobkin refers to Calacanis's latest blog as "poopydiaperblog", and uses words like "mind-numbingly", "unspeakable", and "subpar". What's more, you'll also find, in the comments, the transcript of the IM conversation that Calacanis and Dobkin had after the piece was published. Dobkin didn't put it there himself, but he certainly hasn't taken it down, and let's just say that it does somewhat contradict Calacanis's claim elsewhere that "these days I’m just not as aggressive and confrontational". (The phrase "you are fucking asshole piece of shit" springs to mind as one counterexample.)

Most of the personal animus seems to spring from the fact that Dobkin railed not only on Calacanis, but also, implicitly, on his mother, who co-writes the new blog. Evidently, insulting Jason Calacanis's mother is something one simply doesn't do: Calacanis says in the comments that "First, I take this very personal... you don't talk about people's mothers and wives in Brooklyn--not if you're smart". Now, Jake, what was that you were saying about how in 2004, "blogs will play a role in a major crime, either murder or assault"?

All this culminated in a slightly defensive public apology from Dobkin to Calacanis, with Dobkin saying that "was meant to be light hearted", and repeating in many different ways that he didn't mean to offend. On the other hand, he does say that publicising the IM transcript "was not my intention", which raises the question of why he's kept it up on the Gothamist comments.

In any case, it's clear that the war of the New York blog entrepeneurs, which heretofore has been a simple Denton vs Calacanis affair, is now very much a three-way affair. Dobkin says in the comments to the shark-jumping post that he "likes to take a close look at these things once or twice a month" – it's going to be very interesting to see what's next, in the wake of the Art of Speed and BloggingBaby posts. He's certainly demonstrated an ability to put people's backs up – which may or may not be a good thing in this line of business.

Posted by Felix at 18:18 EST

Comments

i love you, felix salmon! i love you, i love you, i love you.

Posted by: jake at 18:37 EST, June 11, 2004

Great blow-by-blow, Felix. My guess is that it was a hot Friday, probably a lot of extra hours were spent that week in the office, and tempers -- well, jason's -- flared.

Add a snarky comment alluding to ones mother, and it's on like Gray Poupon.

I know Jason somewhat. He's fiercely protective of his family, and that is an admirable quality. He also likes Gothamist a lot, even links to them on his blog. He is also a committed workaholic.

My guess is that the stress of running a business and all that networking that he is known for clouded innate knowledge of the Iron Law of Blogging and it's ancillary corollaries: Deflect snark, if possible ignore said snarky remark, and NEVER confront a snarky blog entry in anger head on.

As this happened on a Friday, I suspect that cooler heads will prevail and everything will be back to the same old by Monday, only, the sometimes syrupy veneer of the civility in the blogosphere will be slightly but permanently altered.

Posted by: Ron Mwangaguhunga at 12:26 EST, June 12, 2004

Hey Felix, so you like to do "A Brief History" posts too? V. well done in any case.

Posted by: Sarah at 21:00 EST, June 13, 2004