Death of a Blogger — Robert Guskind, R.I.P. - The Brooklyn Paper

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob Guskind at last year's Brooklyn Blogfest at the Brooklyn Lyceum and was a regular reader of his blog, GowanusLounge...

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After days of speculation inside and outside the blogosphere, much-liked journalist Robert Guskind died on Wednesday, several blogs reported today.

The death of the creative mind behind the Gowanus Lounge blog, whose behavior had been increasingly erratic over the past few months as he has lost several jobs, separated from his wife amid an extra-marital affair, and waged angry crusades against supposed enemies, was first reported by his friend and fellow blogger, Miss Heather, who runs a popular Greenpoint-based Web site.

She reported in a video that he was found dead in his apartment. Another blog, Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, confirmed the death with the city medical examiner.

Guskind’s Gowanus Lounge site had been down for days, and his obsessively regular Twitter blasts also stopped coming on Monday, said friends who expressed their concern to The Brooklyn Paper.

The NYPD offered no reports of a suicide near Guskind’s home, which, after separating from his wife, was in the Prospect Heights portion of the 77th Precinct.

In his prime, Guskind’s blog focussed a keen eye on city development projects with an objectivity and a level of reporting rare in the blog world. But last year, amid his personal turmoil, angry, unreported rants became more frequent.

Then, last month, the formerly jovial journo lost a regular job as a blogger for Curbed, a real-estate Web site. Fellow writers who met with Guskind at that time described him to The Brooklyn Paper as “a broken man.”

Check back at BrooklynPaper.com later for updates on this breaking story.

Photo: Flatbush Gardener Flickr page...

Blogroll Amnesty Day -- February 3rd

February 3 is Blogroll Amnesty Day, a celebration of small blogs. Bloggers across blogtopia will be linking blogs smaller than they are. Tiny blogs can link anyone they like.

Klein’s Name Is Floated, and Bloggers Object by Elissa Gootman - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

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The blogosphere may have given Barack Obama’s presidential campaign a lift, but it could have the opposite effect on the candidacy of a contender to be his education secretary: Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has been mentioned as a possible secretary of education. (Photo: Annie Tritt for The New York Times)

No sooner was Mr. Klein’s name floated as a candidate for the federal post than parents, educators and others who have criticized his handling of the city school system took to the Internet to try to scuttle the nomination.

On Proudparenting.com, the blogger HalWLanse wrote:

Chancellor Klein’s leadership is questionable, to say the least. I’ve never heard a teacher speak well of him. President-elect Obama won the election because he is an inspirational leader. Joel Klein has drawn the ire of teachers and parents alike. Choosing him as secretary of education would be a provocative move.

On SmallTalk, Michael Klonsky wrote, in a posting titled “Worst possible choice for Sec. of Ed.? Joel Klein,” that he had been “bombarded” with emails from educators and teacher groups in New York, “panic stricken over the possibility” that Mr. Klein could be appointed to the federal post.

On a blog attached to the Obama campaign’s official Web site, a poster with the handle Woodlass from New York, N.Y., pleaded with President-elect Obama to pass over Mr. Klein, writing:

He hasn’t made schools in this city any better than they had been, because it’s obvious students aren’t doing so well and neither are the teachers. He excluded parents and the rank-and-file from the decision-making process, poured millions into machines to crunch data for no practical purpose, and he neither respects or defends truth.

And since last week, Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, has urged parents to address their concerns about Mr. Klein to The Nation, which she said was planning to post the observations of parents and other stakeholders on its website.

“The Department of Education under Joel Klein has been run like a ruthless dictatorship,” Ms. Haimson wrote. “In short, he has been a disaster for our schools, and Barack Obama should be forewarned not to name him to any position of authority in his administration — as much as we would like to get rid of him!”

Asked about the criticisms, David Cantor, the chancellor’s press secretary, said in an e-mail message:

The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids. Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked. That’s a trade he’ll make every time.

Twin-Turtle Shell Shock - Turtles Blog

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Meet Jekyll & Hyde - extremely rare baby twin turtles - who share a shell and are now being studied by amazed scientists on Long Island.

The conjoined diamondback turtles, barely bigger than a thumbnail, were found 12 days ago at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens, said Hofstra University Associate Professor of Biology Russell Burke.

Jekyll & Hyde "is a really weird animal" with six legs, two heads, two tails and one shell, he said.

"You can't look at this guy and not be amazed. He's pretty cool."

Chemical pollution could be responsible for the mutation, but the most likely explanation is "it happened completely naturally - because every reproduction event is a toss of the dice," Burke said.

Brooklyn (Queens) Congressman Will Not Quit Mayor’s Race Even if Bloomberg Runs Again by Michael Barbaro - NYTimes.com

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Representative Anthony D. Weiner has opposed Mayor Bloomberg’s bid for a third term. He is seen here at the Columbus Day parade. James Estrin/The New York Times

Representative Anthony D. Weiner was sitting in the back corner of a Starbucks in Lower Manhattan, a cellphone headset tethered to his ear, a set of talking points in front of him and 15 bloggers on the line waiting for his latest attack on the mayor’s plan to engineer a third term in office.

“The mayor said the days of Boss Tweed will forever be over, but, no, they’re back,” he declared, as he gestured for an aide to bring him a document.

Mr. Weiner — a combative, Brooklyn-born champion of the middle class — was considered the front-runner in next year’s mayoral race until the current occupant of that office, Michael R. Bloomberg, upended the city’s political world by challenging the city’s term-limits law so that he could run for re-election. Suddenly, a wide-open race for Mr. Weiner looked painfully crowded.

So now Mr. Weiner is transforming his candidacy into a full-throated populist crusade against the billionaire Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal for a third term, hurling his thin frame in front a political locomotive roaring down the tracks.

In the process, Mr. Weiner said he had found his voice — and purpose — in the 2009 election for mayor: defending New York City’s ordinary, working people against the self-interested, back-room deals of its most powerful.

He has quickly become the most prominent and relentless of the mayor’s grass-roots opponents, who accuse Mr. Bloomberg and his wealthy friends in the business world of trying to circumvent the will of New York’s voters, who backed term limits twice, in 1993 and 1996.

Representative Anthony D. Weiner has become a fixture on the steps of City Hall, opposing Mayor Bloomberg’s bid for a third term. James Estrin/The New York Times

Mr. Weiner, 43, has held a blizzard of press conferences and rallies, becoming a fixture on the steps of City Hall over the last two weeks. He has set up a Web site, LetNYCVote.com, that encourages city residents to testify against the mayor’s plan at a public hearing at City Hall on Thursday. And he has posted videos on his Facebook.com profile accusing Mr. Bloomberg and his allies on the City Council of “trying to take away your chance to vote.”

To Mr. Weiner, fighting Mr. Bloomberg on term limits is the capstone of a decade-long battle on behalf of the city’s vast, overlooked middle. “This issue is another classic example of the powerful and moneyed elite ignoring the idea that are a lot of other people in the city who should be part of our civic conversation,” he said.

“So I have embraced this fight, not only because obviously I have a lot at stake, but because it’s so much about my single animating vision of the city.”

The odds appear to be stacked against him. Mr. Bloomberg is convinced that he has enough support in the Council to pass legislation that would allow him and dozens of other elected officials to serve 12 consecutive years, rather than eight.

If the legislation passes, Mr. Bloomberg is expected to spend about $80 million in his re-election campaign — $20 million of it dedicated to attacking Mr. Weiner, according to people familiar with the plan.

By contrast, Mr. Weiner has raised $5 million for his campaign, according to the latest city records. Even with matching funds from the city, his campaign spending is expected to pale in comparison to that of Mr. Bloomberg, whose fortune is — or at least was recently — estimated at $15 billion.

In a lengthy interview this week, Mr. Weiner said that he “understands the prodigious influence of wealth,” but that he will not back down, even if Mr. Bloomberg prevails in rewriting the term-limits law and enters the 2009 race.

“Look, I am running for mayor, and I fully expect to be the next mayor of this city,” he said. Mr. Weiner, a five-term representative, ran an unsuccessful race against Mr. Bloomberg for mayor in 2005. A Bloomberg re-election campaign “”would certainly be a different race,” he said, but “I still don’t think its going to happen.”

“It’s so offensive to just the entire way that the checks and balances of government are supposed to work and the way that things go down in New York,” he said.

Mr. Weiner is banking on a backlash against the mayor, which could work in his favor if the race boils down to the two candidates.

Mark Green, who ran against Mr. Bloomberg in 2001, said the mayor’s third-term aspirations “will either bury or boost Weiner. But it’s a little too early to know whether Bloomberg’s maneuver will trigger a big public outcry or a little one. It could be big.”

Since he learned that Mr. Bloomberg would try to run again — a headline flashed across his BlackBerry on Sept. 30, nearly knocking him off his feet, he recalled — Mr. Weiner has thrown himself into the debate.

He and his staff have been researching whether the legislation before the Council might violate federal voting-rights laws or city conflict-of-interest statutes, reaching out to experts on New York City election law, like Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor, and Richard Emery, who is also a civil rights lawyer.

Among their discoveries: the City Council held nine public hearings before passing legislation on horse carriages, but will hold just two before voting on whether to change term limits.

Mr. Weiner has attended rallies and press conferences with Letitia James and Bill de Blasio, council members who oppose the extension and are instead calling for a public referendum on whether to alter term limits. (Mr. Weiner himself still opposes term limits, and voted against them in 1993 and 1996.)

His push lacks the gloss of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaigns. In videos high on outrage but low on production value, he stands in front of City Hall, jacket off and sleeves rolled up, attacking Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy. “This is your building,” he says, pointing to the office he hopes to occupy.

He said it is working. He was still in skates after his weekly hockey game this week when a member of the opposing team told him to “keep up the fight,” he said, and an office worker in Manhattan called out to him, “They’re not going to get away with this!”

The campaign is vintage Weiner, who is known for outresearching, outpoliticking and out-fund-raising his opponents, first as a council member, then in Congress. And it also bears his trademark self-certainty. He predicted that come Election Day 2009 , Mr. Bloomberg “would find himself voting for me.”

Mr. Weiner has reserved his most stinging criticism for the mayor and the speaker of the Council, Christine C. Quinn, who has endorsed Mr. Bloomberg’s term-limits plan. He calls the agreement “the mother of al back-room deals.”

“Never again can the speaker and the mayor talk about their desire to reform government, talk about their desire to get back room deals out of City Hall,” he said.

But he has been careful to not pick a fight with the city’s business titans, at least by name. Many, like Jerry Speyer, the real estate developer who urged Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term, were major donors to the Weiner campaign. And Mr. Weiner said that he needed their backing to be an effective mayor.

“These people are important elements of how we are going to run a successful city,” he said. “I am not running against them. But there is a whole other city out there that sometimes I think those folks don’t realize we need to address.”

He said he understood why those business leaders might want to support Mr. Bloomberg. “It’s not wrong for people to want Mike Bloomberg to have a third term.

That’s fine,” he said. But with the mayor rushing to change the term-limits law through legislation, rather than a referendum, he said, “we are not having that argument. And that’s what’s truly troubling to me.”

LetNYCVote.com - Rep Weiner Urges the Public to Speak Out About Term Limits at City Council Hearings on Thursday October 16th

Today, Congressman Anthony Weiner held a tele-conference with local bloggers...He urged the bloggers to let the public know about the Term-limit hearings being conducted later this week by the City Council and encourage them to tesitify...

He has a new web-site: LetNYCVote.com

The site will facilitate citizens by allowing them to sign up to speak at the City Council hearings...It will also keep you up to date with the latest news, schedule and other information...

The congressman said that this is “...an orchestrated attempt to do an end run around the public” and that this is “An an inside deal between one side of City Hall with the other side of City Hall.”

He also strongly feels that hearing should take place in all 5 boroughs on this important issue, especially since 9 hearings were held throughout the boroughs on Lead paint poisoning, and city-wide hearing are held on many other items.

When: The hearing starts at 1:00pm on Thursday and the City Council says they’ll let the hearing run for as long as it takes to hear everyone who wants to testify. Come before work, on your lunch hour, at the end of the day or anytime in between.

Where: City Hall - Council Chambers (2nd Floor)
Bring ID to get through the security guards on Park Row or Broadway.
By subway: 4/5/6 to City Hall or the 2/3 to Park Place or the R/W to City Hall or the J/M/Z to Chambers

Among the bloggers who attended the tele-conference were:

Jen Chung – The Gothamist

Liz Benjamin – The Daily Politics - NY Daily News

Phillip Anderson – The Albany Project

Morgan Pehme – The Brooklyn Optimist

Community Characters - David M. Quintana by Michael Lanza - Queens Tribune, September 25th Issue

David M. Quintana
Ozone Park
South Queens Blogger, Preservationist and Political Activist

“Most people are very apathetic at best, but somebody’s gotta get out there and speak up. I’m not afraid to speak up.”

When David M. Quintana started his blog a year and a half ago, it was just a simple way for him to replace an e-mail list he used to distribute information in his neighborhood. But more than 80,000 hits later, he’s become one of the most recognizable faces of South Queens. His blog, Lost in the Ozone, is one of the most prolific in the borough and a hot destination for South Queens community advocates.

Community Character:

Quintana has focused much of his energy on raising awareness about the preservation of Ridgewood Reservoir, Jamaica Bay and other parks around the borough.

“At one point in the city budget, parks was 1.5 percent of the total city budget,” Quintana said. “Now it’s under one percent.”

Quintana isn’t shy about criticizing officials responsible for the parks either. He said efforts to preserve and maintain natural havens in the borough over the last few years have been inadequate.

He pointed to a community forum held where he said that although 90 percent of the attendees opposed changes at Ridgewood Reservoir, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation went ahead with proposals to change the historic park anyway.

“It seems as though the parks department has trouble with letting people know the truth,” he said. “I think they had a pre conceived agenda going in and they hoped that the public would conform to that with some suggestions. They saw that the public wasn’t but went ahead with their plan anyway.”

As a member of Community Board 10 and South Queens’ unofficial blogger, he’s no stranger to confronting authorities when he sees conflict with the community’s interests.

The stalwart progressive has set his sites on State Sen. Serphin Maltese (R- Glendale), who he said no longer represents the community, but the political interests of the senate’s Republican majority.

He’s also confronting Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s development and education agendas.

“Overdevelopment has been terrible,” he said. “The public is being spun by the City Hall. These people aren’t telling the truth.”

The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived by Amanda M. Fairbanks - NYTimes.com

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WHEN Pam Spaulding heard from two contributors to her blog, Pam’s House Blend, that they couldn’t afford to attend the Democratic National Convention, she knew that historic times called for creative measures.

UNPAID HOBBY Pam Spaulding called on readers to help her get to the Democratic convention. Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Getting convention credentials for her blog, a news site for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, was the easy part. As air fare, lodging and incidentals began piling up, paying for the trip to Denver became the bigger obstacle.

For Ms. Spaulding, 45, who works full time as an IT manager at Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., blogging is her passion, an unpaid hobby she pursues at nights and on weekends. So she called on her 5,500 daily readers to help raise funds: “Send the Blend to Denver” reads the ChipIn widget on her blog’s home page that tracks donations from readers; so far they have pledged more than $5,000 to transport Ms. Spaulding and three other bloggers to the convention.

Beginning Monday, hundreds of bloggers will descend on Denver to see Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination. Next week, hundreds more will travel to St. Paul to witness John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But now these online partisans, many of whom are self-financed, must contend with all the logistical and financial hurdles just to get there — not to mention the party politics happening behind the scenes.

This year, both parties understand the need to have greater numbers of bloggers attend. While many Americans may watch only prime-time television broadcasts of the convention speeches, party officials also recognize the ability of bloggers to deliver minute-by-minute coverage of each day’s events to a niche online audience.

“The goal is to bring down the walls of the convention and invite in an audience that’s as large as possible,” said Aaron Myers, the director of online communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee. “Credentialing more bloggers opens up all sorts of new audiences.”

But some bloggers see the procurement of credentials as less of a privilege and more of a right, in recognition of their grass-roots influence. “This is stuff we deserve — we helped the party get people elected,” said Matt Stoller, a political consultant and a contributor to the blog Open Left, who worked as the volunteer in charge of getting credentials for bloggers at the Democratic convention four years ago. “Maybe in 2004 it was about being accommodating and innovative — but this time around there’s a real fight for power in the party.” The major political parties first gave credentials to bloggers in 2004. The Republicans allowed a dozen bloggers to attend their convention in New York, while the Democrats gave bloggers 35 seats in the nosebleed section of the Fleet Center in Boston.

This year, the R.N.C. gave credentials to 200 bloggers as a means to “get Senator McCain’s message out to more people,” said Joanna Burgos, the press secretary of the convention.

For bloggers attending the Democratic convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, two types of credentials are offered. The first is a national credential, which offers the same access granted to members of traditional news media organizations.

The second, more coveted credential is the state blogger credential. It allows one blogger per state to cover the convention alongside its state delegation, with unlimited floor access. Inspired by the strategy of Howard Dean, the D.N.C. chairman, to organize in all 50 states, the state-blogging credential was highly sought after, with as many as 14 blogs vying to represent a single state.

D.N.C. organizers said the recipients of these credentials were chosen by looking at the posts and mission statements of the competing blogs, and at the traffic these sites generated. But controversy soon arose in the blogosphere about whether political favoritism played a role.

DENVER-BOUND Phillip Anderson, whose blog covers New York State politics. Democrats didn’t provide the convention access he wanted. Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times

“It’s a recognition from the D.N.C. of the work that you’ve done, of your import, your significance,” said Phillip Anderson, 38, whose blog, the Albany Project, has covered New York State politics since 2006. “We were the site the D.N.C. was talking about — we just assumed we would get it,” said Mr. Anderson, who received a national credential instead of the state honor.

Mr. Myers of the Democratic National Convention Committee conceded that tough calls had to be made. “Nobody here, certainly not I, believes there’s only one good blog in every state,” he said. “It’s just not true.” In the last week, the D.N.C. released an additional 100 credentials that will allow multiple contributors from the same blog to cover the convention in tandem.

But the last-minute disbursement of credentials has only exacerbated many bloggers’ frustrations.

“It’s unprecedented access for bloggers, yes, but it’s certainly not equal access,” said Ms. Spaulding, who learned last week that Pam’s House Blend would receive two extra credentials. “What, pray tell, is the big secret?”

The annoyance felt by many bloggers is familiar to those who previously attended conventions as correspondents for smaller print publications. “This is very reminiscent of being at the low end of the totem pole,” said Micah Sifry, the co-founder of the group blog Techpresident.com, who formerly wrote for The Nation magazine and attended his first convention in 1984. “They can’t buy a sky box, they’re scrambling.”

One perk that bloggers will have access to in Denver is the Big Tent, an 8,000-square-foot two-story structure adjacent to where the convention is being held. For a $100 entrance fee, 400 credentialed bloggers will be allowed to enter the air-conditioned space, hosted by a coalition of progressive blogs and organizations and sponsored by the Web sites Google and Digg, where they can eat meals and find work spaces with Wi-Fi.

“I’m telling everyone to meet me at the Big Tent,” said Fred Gooltz, 30, an online strategist with Advomatic, a Web development and strategy firm. “That’s where I’ll be meeting everyone else who’s like me, folks that I’ve only met online or blogged and e-mailed with.” Mr. Gooltz sees the $100 fee as a bargain, especially since he would rather network “with movementarians, who see themselves as a progressive movement, separate from the Democratic Party hierarchy.”

Markos Moulitsas, whose Web site, the Daily Kos, is one of the Big Tent’s organizers, said he would probably remain in the tent for much, if not all, of the convention. “I have no interest in going to the convention hall and chances are I will not,” he said. “There’s nothing happening in the convention hall that would justify braving the long security lines and crowds.”

For bloggers who do not wield as much influence as Mr. Moulitsas, paying for the trip to Denver meant appealing directly to their readers for contributions — an uneasy bargain for many writers who value their independence.

This summer marked the first time that Mr. Anderson of the Albany Project asked readers for donations on his own behalf. “I would never go to my readers and say, I really need a vacation,” said Mr. Anderson, who makes his living as a consultant, and earns a few thousand dollars a year from the advertising revenue his blog generates. “It’s kind of humbling that people value what we’re doing to the point where they’re willing to give us $20.”

Through contributions as small as $5 or $10, Mr. Anderson said, he was able to raise about $1,500 for his Denver trip.

John Odum, 40, the lead author of the political blog Green Mountain Daily, felt similarly conflicted. Though his readers did supply him with a new laptop computer on his 40th birthday, Mr. Odum, who lives in Montpelier, Vt., and works for a local environmental nonprofit, was reluctant to ask them for further acts of generosity. In an election year, he said, “People ought to be giving it to a candidate, not giving me their spare money.”

Now a yellow “donate” icon on his site links to a separate PayPal account, where readers can contribute toward Mr. Odum’s estimated $1,000 travel costs. He said he had received enough support to pay for the $400 air fare.

“It takes me back to my hippie-ish youth, thrown in a situation with very little to fall back on and not 100 percent certain where I’ll be sleeping,” Mr. Odum said. He said he might have to unfurl his sleeping bag on someone’s hotel room floor if the housing space he reserved on Craigslist does not pan out.

Among the devoted readers who believe Mr. Odum deserves their donations is Nate Freeman, one of two Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor of Vermont. Mr. Freeman, 40, gave about $100 to Mr. Odum’s laptop fund, and said he would contribute $50 for Mr. Odum’s convention trip.

“Barack doesn’t need my 50 bucks,” Mr. Freeman said, “but John does.”