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.