Jake Dobkin - FishbowlNY

Gothamist Enters Long Form World with a Splash

Chris O'Shea — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:18:36 +0000

Gothamist, the blog that covers anything and everything New York, has entered the world of long form writing in a big way. Today the site has published snippets of a piece titled, “Confessions of a ‘Rape Cop’ Juror.” The article was written by Patrick Kirkland, one of the jurors who acquitted the infamous NYPD “rape cop,” Kenneth Moreno.

It’s a very powerful read, so FishbowlNY decided to catch up with Jake Dobkin, Gothamist’s Publisher and Co-Fouder, to talk with him about it and the site’s first foray into long form pieces. [Full disclosure: I have freelanced for Gothamist]

Gothamist got about 300 submissions when it put out the word that it was looking to publish something in the long form realm, but Dobkin said Kirkland’s easily stood out among the crowd.

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Gothamist Editor Swipes At New York Times, City Blog

Drew Grant — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:30:00 +0000

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.

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

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

Drew Grant — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Lockhart Steele with Jake Dobkin, Jonathan Butler, and Mark Josephson

“300 words, max…anything else, it’s an essay.” Those were the words of New York blogger Jake Dobkin at last night’s panel for The Future of Local Media.

The topic this month was “Local Journalism: What’s Cool In Your Hood?” But, the only thing the panelists could seem to agree upon was the more posts, the better — even when it means the death of any original journalism.

“We write 20 to 24 pieces of content a day,” said Jonathan Butler, founder of Brooklyn blog Brownstoner. “Generally all but three of those pieces are original reporting…Picture posts are great.”

Dobkin, who founded Gothamist in 2003, was definitely seeking to provoke his audience. When asked about the concept of pay walls for online publications, the young entrepreneur flippantly replied that this would be the best thing for his business. “Have them charge $20 for content! No one else will pay, but we will, and we will steal their stories,” he said. “That’s my two year plan.”

Behind the bluster, Dobkin has a point: Why pay for original content when blogs will aggregate it for their readers for free?

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