The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY

The Local, a new Times blog, has two reporters and an editor covering two neighborhoods in Brooklyn and three New Jersey towns. Jim Schachter, the Times's editor for "digital initiatives," tells the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site will never make money on its own:

If every single person who lives in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange came to these sites every day and made one impression, that would be about 120,000 impressions a day. It is barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.... If you, for each site, have one full-time New York Times reporter and half of a editor, I don't think there is any way that this could ever pencil out as profitable.

But that's not the point, Schachter says: The Times is trialing the sites in order to build a software platform for other community sites, which local bloggers, possibly unaffiliated with the Times, will run. (It's worth noting that the New York Times Co. is an investor in Automattic, the San Francisco-based maker of WordPress, which Times blogs like The Local run on.)

That explains why the Times is targeting the exact same towns that Patch, a local-blogging startup backed by Google sales executive Tim Armstrong, chose for its debut. Impossibly vain Maplewood bloggers think that the interest reflects the unique qualities of their hometown. Nonsense. The Times wants to squeeze out a startup before it gets established on its home turf.

Both Patch and the Times are really aiming to be a platform for blogging — because, honestly, who wants to pay writers these days?

Of course, the hyperlocal hypercompetition will likely end up killing everyone, leading people to give up on making money from the "placeblogosphere," as Schachter neologizes it, for good. The only person who wins: Noisome media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who is simultaneously advising the Times and Patch.

Armstrong, Google's top U.S. sales executive, has invested in Patch, a company which promises to develop "hyperlocal" websites focusing on news coverage specific to their communities. He's putting in money from his own fortune — money which he made through Google's lucrative IPO — but one must imagine New York Times executives view Patch as a stalking horse for the search engine.

Hence the new Times feature called The Local. Besides Patch's three towns, The Local will also cover two Brooklyn neighborhoods. It will be entertaining to hear the Times spin on why it picked Patch's turf to launch The Local. Milburn's attractive demographics? South Orange's thriving cultural scene? No, the Times is waging an old-fashioned newspaper war — on the still-unfamiliar turf of the Internet, against a Google millionaire. This will be by far more interesting than anything else that happens in Maplewood.