(This post is part of News.me’s ongoing series, “Getting the News.” In our efforts to understand everything about social news, we’re reaching out to writers and thinkers we like to ask them how they get their daily news. Read the first post here. See all of the posts, from writers and thinkers like Chris Dixon, Zach Seward, and Megan Garber, here.)

This week we sat down with Jake Dobkin, publisher of Gothamist, native New Yorker, and to date the only person to come in for an interview with typed up discussion notes. Gothamist is one of New York City’s go-to websites for city news, information, and generally speaking, what’s cool. But is it hyper-local? “I’m doing hyper-space-local news,” Jake explained to me. “Is it hyper local? I don’t know. But we’re hyper-excited about it!” Metro reporters are an old film noir standby — their dramatic stories and hectic schedules always makes for excellent cinema. Jake is the 21st century’s response to metro reporting.

Gothamist started in New York, but has since spread to a dozen other cities, rapidly populating the digital urban news space in a way that’s somehow cool, approachable, and newsworthy. Covering New York City is not an easy task. There are a thousand things happening at every moment in America’s biggest city. Gothamist has to be a nimble news force — finding news quickly, responding efficiently, and giving everything that razor’s edge of taste that makes it worth coming back to. But reading the news when you’re covering New York is its own adventure. Jake brings not just a rigorous work ethic to his news consumption, but also a philosophy refreshing to see in media. In spare time (which cannot be a lot), Jake takes landscape photographs at BlueJake.com and documents the graffiti scene at Streetsy.com and GrafRank.com. Oh yeah. Jake is a graffiti enthusiast. We told you he was a new kind of metro reporter.

What is Gothamist trying to do?

We’re trying to be the best independent source for news, arts, events, and food in each of our cities. Our parents had independent alt-weeklies, and a lot of those companies have gone out of business because they went out of print. I see ourselves the next generation to that kind of independent media. We want to be a trusted tell-it-like-it-is voice in each city. We don’t need to be comprehensive. My goal is not to be the New York TimesMetro Section. It’s to tell you like what’s really interesting, most interesting, in each of these cities, each day. We are both meme-spotters and original news producers. On a good day, we’re do both of those functions really well. We are the best meta source for New York, because we probably read 2,000 sources for the city — no normal person would have that interest — and from that we’re pulling the best stories.

I really believe that aggregation, when done right, is a real skill. Pulling out the most important facts from the story, knitting them together, adding some original reportage on top — we do that. And then like any newspaper or magazine, we source our own stories. Our interest is probably a little different than most magazines. More interested in youth-friendly stories, things younger people are interested in. Some of the issues we cover — like a biker gets hit by a car — the New York Times would never cover that. But that’s a story for us — especially if they got hit in Williamsburg, or something.

So what’s your morning news routine?

I work half the day on the editorial side, and half on the publishing side, in business and management. But the mornings are editorial. So I wake up early, around 6:30am or 7am, and for about two hours, I work pretty consistently, trying to spot where the most interesting stories are in New York. My guiding principles are two things: First, like everyone, I want a high signal-to-noise ratio. I already have to sort this enormous sea of stories each morning to find the interesting stuff. I don’t want noisy sources that make that job even harder.

The second thing is a little more spiritual. The Buddhists have this expression: Don’t eat poison. As it applies to media, there are certain kinds of media that are bad for you, spiritually. Things that promote materialism, celebrity, the pain and suffering of others. Gothamist sites have a pretty positive voice. “Yay! We’re excited about being here. We want you to be excited about being here.” We’re not trying to revel in negativity, because I think that’s corrosive, spiritually. And I’ve done this now for eight or nine years, so I want to be a happy person. It would really hard to spend that much time doing something that covered celebrity stupidity or “buy this, buy that,” because those are not values that lead to happiness. I try to find sources that are both high-quality in terms of signal-to-noise but also high-quality in terms of promoting values that I believe in. So a lot of the sources I read are more heavily fact-based, or high-quality, longer-form journalism. I really try to avoid stuff that focuses on Hollywood.

I start with email. I get a lot of email, because I’m copied on the tips@gothamist.com emails in New York. People just emailing us telling us what’s going on. I’ll also have a ton of PR pitches that I ignore, and I get alerts from two wire monitoring services here in New York. They monitor police, fire, and government radio frequencies, and they send us alerts when anything’s going on, so it goes to my inbox overnight. We also get emails from the FBI, from most of the government agencies, and stuff. we just started getting emails from the police department last week. It took us eight years to finally fight them to put us on their PR list. We had to get press passes, which I now carry with me, just in case I walk into a story.

In a good day, I can get through email in about 20-30 minutes. By then, any really viral stories I might already be on to, because someone sent it to tips. But then I go through my “Core Sources” — that’s actually what I call that folder — which is Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, and a service called Stellar, which Jason Kottke started. It tracks people’s favorites. In each of those services, I have a signal-to-noise rule. I generally don’t follow more than 75-100 people at any one time. I’m always deleting people. I’ve deleted the Dalai Lama. I’ve deleted my best friend. As soon as somebody gets noisy, or starts talking a lot about what they’re eating, it’s like dude, I just unfollowed you. And then I’ll IM them, and I’ll be like, “Dude, I just unfollowed you!” And they’ll be like “Dude, that’s so hurtful, man!” and I’m like, “Dude, live with it. Tell me when you’re ready to stop polluting my channel.”

I kinda liked Amy Sohn only because she kinda irritated my Park Slope wife and her friends with her “books.” Of course I ignored the fact that she writes navel gazing, oh woe is me rich chick, entitled “literature.” #meh

Now with some distance, she and the entitled class, money, and attitude she portrays in her books are part of what helped drive us away from Brooklyn in real life.

All that said, leave it to a native Park Sloper Jake Dobkin to take her down by calling her bluff…and Amy slinking away with “no comment”…

Jake Dobkin: I read your Awl piece. My first reaction was that some of the stuff you described, like doing “body shots”, partying with your mommy friends till 3 a.m., and blowing guys you aren’t married to, didn’t really happen, or only happened once- like you’re making it up just to troll internet commenters, or you imagined it, like in Fight Club, where the other mommys in your “Hookers, Sluts, and Drug Addicts” club are really just in your head and you’re actually sitting at home alone with one glass of wine most nights. That’s true, right?

Amy Sohn: [No Response]

Dobkin: My second reaction was that having three gin and tonics on Smith Street isn’t exactly wild rebellion or even “behaving like a bunch of twentysomething hipsters”. Is it possible that you’re just pretty normal 40-somethings and that’s terrifying, so you’re enlarging your exploits to make them seem sleazier and wilder than they are?

Sohn: [No Response]

Dobkin: My third reaction was that I’d like to know which of these following behaviors you describe you’re regularly engaging in and why: “But we’re masturbating excessively, cheating on good people, doing coke in newly price-inflated townhouses, and sexting compulsively—though rarely with our partners.” How much masturbation is “excessive”? Do people really still do coke, in Brooklyn? Give me an example of a “sext” that you’ve recently sent or received.

Sohn: [No Response]

Dobkin:My fourth reaction, is that the issues you and your friends have, of Park Slope “boredom” which “turns to terror” when your kids hit PS321, seems like a parody of White People Problems. Like if your biggest challenges are too much time on your hands and real estate envy, maybe volunteer or get another job or something? People are dying in Syria! Is this a legitimate reaction?

Sohn: [No Response]

Dobkin: Can I suggest that maybe you’re just hanging out with the wrong group of people? I mean, if everyone around you is throwing back Xanax and raw-dogging it just to FEEL SOMETHING and then having unplanned kids because they’re too stupid to use birth control, is it possible it’s not Park Slope’s fault, and rather, it might be hanging around with really immature people?