Gothamist Editor Swipes At New York Times, City Blog

No one will ever accuse Jake Dobkin of shying away from controversy. Four months ago, the Gothamist.com founder sat on a panel for The Future of Local Media and declared his two year plan to include stealing stories from publications that put up pay walls, and putting them up on his site for free.

Yesterday, Dobkin took to Facebook to rip The New York Times a new one for copying his ideas, calling the local Cityroom blog “a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist,” and the Times‘ Local blog, “a recently closed ripoff of Brownstoner.com” (another New York-centric blog, owned by Jonathan Butler). What was the impetus for Dobkin taking credit for Cityroom? An email exchange with Times writer David Carr for an upcoming internal Times panel on Thursday.

Dobkin admits that the NYT still plays an important part in delivering news, but that its “slavish devotion to originality and old-fashioned reporting, they’ve lost their most important civic role,” and that hyper-local blogs like Gothamist, Brownstoner, and Curbed.com will never “run out of local content to pass through our curation machine.”

It will be interesting to see how Carr and the two other Times executives respond tomorrow to Dobkin’s claims tomorrow.

Read More: Jake Dobkin: From an Email to David Carr about The New York Times –Facebook

Previously: Local NY Bloggers Speak: Why Write, When You Can Aggregate?

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