Jake Dobkin

Dobkin is a native of New York City and grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn.^[4] He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, attended Binghamton University, and graduated from Columbia University in 1998.^[5][6] He also received an MBA from New York University Stern School of Business in 2005.^[7]

Dobkin worked as an IT consultant when he co-founded the blog Gothamist in 2003 with his Columbia classmate, Jen Chung.^[8][9] He left his job to work for the blog full-time in 2005. In 2007 and 2008, he and Chung were named one of "New York's coolest tech people" by Business Insider.^[10]

He once criticized The New York Times prior to a panel with media critic David Carr, calling the paper's “old-fashioned reporting” out-of-touch with a younger generation of readers.^[11] New York magazine and Gawker claimed that his comments sabotaged the company's supposedly successful acquisition by James L. Dolan's media company Cablevision.^{[12][13][14][15]}

In 2017, Gothamist was purchased by DNAinfo, founded by conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts, and Dobkin was kept to run the blog.^[16][17] Ricketts shut down the site in November 2017 after writers voted to unionize.^[18] WNYC announced in 2018 that it has pooled the resources to buy the blog and hired Dobkin and Chung.^[19]

In 2013, he started a column called Ask a Native New Yorker, and adapted his columns into a book of the same name that was published in 2019.^[20] He is also a photographer of street art and urban landscapes.^[21][22]