It’s hard to know exactly what conclusion to draw about New York Magazine’s cover story called “The Brooklyn Wars.” It deals with blogging and Brooklyn–specifically with Brooklyn’s biggest and most successful blog, Brownstoner. Yet, the article does so mainly by dealing with one of the site’s most persistent commenters, who identifies himself as “The What.” The very long article focuses on the rather heated discussions that often development on readers, saying for instance, “the conversation, which now takes place all day, every day in the comments left on his blog (like the ones above), would become quite so spirited, with his commenters functioning like a cross between a Greek chorus, a clamorous town-hall meeting, and a howling mob.” Of Brownstoner, New York writes: “The site celebrates what’s sometimes called New Brooklyn: a vision of the borough as a diverse and lively enclave of flowering neighborhoods, all jammed with engaged homeowners, reborn blocks, and gorgeous and stately and (by Manhattan standards) bargain-priced real estate, waiting to be polished up under a tasteful eye.”

Then, the story turns its attention to the gentleman known as “The What”:

The What often posts several times a day. He ends each comment with a quote apparently borrowed from Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now: “Someday this war’s gonna end.” If you were to cast the site’s commenters in a kind of school-pageant play, you’d costume The What in ashes and sackcloth, hand him a sign reading THE END IS NIGH (or, more accurately, SOMEDAY THIS WAR’S GONNA END), then send him to the street corner to rant. The What’s favorite—and possibly only—subject of interest is the coming Brooklyn Apocalypse. He calls it the Mutant Real Estate Bubble. From the beginning, he has contended vehemently, and repetitiously, and often profanely, that there’s a massive correction coming to the real-estate market that will swallow the borough’s fresh-faced transplants and their artfully renovated brownstones as surely as if a chasm had opened up in the earth. Which, of course, means an end to the whole happy vision of recent Brooklyn: the flowering neighborhoods, the skyrocketing prices, the dissipating crime. To The What, Mr. Brownstoner and his readers are snoozing blissfully, lost in this intoxicating dream. And The What is the alarm clock.

We could go on, but there is much to read if one has the patience for the full story. We will simply quote from Brownstoner’s own post about the subject:

[There] were some interesting thoughts about what the commenting culture on the blog says about the collective psyche of Brownstone Brooklyn. Our only major gripe was that it played up the importance of one egomaniacal commenter over some of the more constructive aspects of the community. In the end, though, it did include one belief of ours that we’ve clung to from the beginning: That as messy as many of the threads get, the tough issues that underlie much of the change that Brooklyn has experienced in recent years—class, race, gentrification—are at least getting discussed, and often among people who wouldn’t otherwise be mingling offline. The conversations could be a lot more polite, but at least they are happening.

Now, could someone focus on some of the critically important reporting that’s being done online, as well?