After a turbulent couple of months at Gawker, the New York Times Style section is checking the media website’s pulse and wondering, with equal parts hope and desperation, if Gawker has finally jumped the “snark”. The Times’s uptick in Gawker stalking mirrors their aggressive game of catch-up with “teh internets” by increasingly emphasizing blogs on their website, and the article finds the Gray Lady digging a nice, cozy grave for Gawker owner and editor Nick......

The assumption that buying is preferable to renting is so ingrained in our national real estate psyche, that to suggest otherwise could result in someone questioning your financial, if not actual, sanity. The New York Times did some serious nationwide number crunching, however, and is concluding that renters fared better than buyers over the last two years. The turnabout is the result of buyers facing higher monthly costs than renters, while losing money on......

- The City Council starts working on keeping carriages and horses in Central Park - Breaking and entering into an abandoned warehouse for dinner is the new new - Remember the guy who put a camera in his shopping bag to take upskirt videos? He was sentenced to six months - Stanley Crouch weighs in on the cellphone ban in schools - NY State smoking age could go up to 19; what a year......

Felix Salmon is our favorite Englishman in New York. Why? Because he's anything but laconic. He can write a thirty paragraph essay regarding just about anything. For instance, over the last two days, he's written more than 3600 words about buses. That's right, buses. The heart of his meditation is a simple question: would buses move faster if drivers were paid per passenger, instead of a fixed wage. The question comes out of a University......

The watchdog group Americans for More Civility has bestowed a "Civie" on New Yorkers for our behavior during the Transit Strike last December. Aw, that's so sweet - and it's an extra, unexpected bonus that "Civies" sounds a lot like "skivvies." Gothamist has to agree that our fellow New Yorkers were more tolerant than usual - and even went out of their way to help people (like Felix Salmon, who took a ZipCar and......

Famous British blogger Felix Salmon rented a Zipcar on Thursday and spent seven hours giving people free rides around town. That's so nice! Good work, Felix! A small slice of his adventure: I drop off Abby Russell at CBS on 57th and 11th. Now I need to head downtown, since a couple of Jill Platner employees need a lift at 5:30. Can I make it? 11th Avenue is packed, so I wend my way......

It's the Day After Yesterday in the "Gawker vs. Mediabistro FishbowlNY" face-off for media gossip eyeballs. With some interesting discussion in our comments from our earlier post, Gothamist asked our experts, Ellen Correia of Standard Deviance and Felix Salmon of MemeFirst, to give us some now more-educated thoughts. A) Ellen Correia: To start of this coverage of the head-to-head matchup let's look how the two camps treated the New York Times City article that started......

Be warned, anyone who works in media or anyone who knows anyone who works in media or anyone who knows anyone who consumes media. Apparently, a line in the sand has been drawn between blogs that cover NY media - a line in the sand, people! Or at least that's what an article in the NY Times City section suggests. The facts: In one snarky corner, there's Gawker with snarky publisher Nick Denton and snarky......

Toby Leah Bochan, About.com Editor...

From photoblogging to prison bologna sandwiches, Mike from Satan's Laundromat spends 30 hours in lockup after being arrested Friday night! Mike rode in the bike protest:Rather than writing us summonses for the offenses we were charged with, which were violations (on par with a traffic ticket or an open container), not even misdemeanors, the cops decided to teach us a lesson by hauling us over to a bus depot-turned-holding cell where we got to sleep......

Gothamist, fond of Amanda Hesser ever since we saw cook from her book, The Cook and the Gardener, at Fairway a few years ago, has to hand it to her. In her Dining & Wine > Restaurants: Mystery, Allure and Sushi" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/02/dining/02REST.html?ex=1401595200&en=52eb7c23cf74332c&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">review of Masa, the swank $300 prix-fixe Japanese restaurant at the TimeWarner Center, she refuses to give it a rating...but not because it's bad:Masa is my last review as the interim restaurant critic. After......

The NY Times writes about how lots of people keep blogs even though few read them, and the bloggers become obsessive over posting entries. (News flash: People really get into their personal hobbies!) It includes the requisite quote from Jeff Jarvis (something about addiction or narcissism or obsession...but not the 12-step program). Luckily, Felix Salmon writes a parody of the article so no one else has to. Gothamist may be a blog, but we......

Yes, the blogosphere is built on mentioning other bloggers and giving them credit for slight, inconsequential things - blogfucking, we believe it's called. Still, we were surprised to see the New Yorker engaging in this kind of thing. In this week's issue, Daniel Radosh interviews ambitious ICM agent, Kate Lee, who he credits with "sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing" when reading blogs [Disclosure: Gothamist met......

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the NY Bloggers Talk last night at the Apple Store. It was a fabulous turnout, and, speaking on behalf of the speakers and moderators, we appreciated your support and great questions. And Gothamist is planning another talk, so let us know if you have any suggestions for topics. Gothamist also would like to thank: Jason Calacanis, Nick Denton, and Jeff Jarvis for a spirited (though less punchy than wished......

Various personalities of the blogging world will collide at the NY Bloggers talk at the SoHo Apple Store this Monday, May 3. See Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis moderate/referee a discussion with web publishers Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis. ftrain's Paul Ford chats with Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, and Jason Kottke about technology. And Felix Salmon will find out what kinds of medication Choire Sicha, Lockhart Steele, and Jen Chung must be on during the editors......

The publishing world is abuzz upon news of the Amazon error that showed reviewers' true identities (bad, technology, bad!) which, as Gawker aptly put it, "gave a little peek into the world of friends pimping friends' books and bitter unpublished writers trashing other writers. (It seems Amazon is sort of like, oh, any street corner in lower Manhattan.)" David Eggers was revealed to have written a review pimping friend Heidi Julavits' The Effects of Living......

Some of our favorite blogs freak out about the first New Yorker of 2004: Felix Salmon at Memefirst suspects that the "trademarked Eggers High Ironic" he reads in an article about best of lists comes from Ben Greenman. After thinking, "what on earth is the most venerable magazine in the world doing appropriating a prose style which was cool for about ten minutes in 1997," Felix almost goes over the edge when he discovers the......

Great photo essay by Christopher Hawthorne in Slate about architecture's new trend: Modest and even introverted design, over spectacle, which he calls "The Om Factor." Two polar opposites in museum design he cites are Guggenheim Bilbao and Dia: Beacon. Read Felix Salmon's essay about the Dia:Beacon. Gothamist went to the similarly minimally designed Mass MoCA.......

Photolog Revolution
A straight-up South American revolution is taking place on fotolog.net, pitting the sexy camgirls against the artistic photobloggers. Gothamist continues its investigation....