John Brownstoner and his websites were called BEST EMERGING WEB EMPIRE in the Village Voice’s Best of NYC issue. Who can forget John’s disguise at the First Annual Brooklyn Blog Fest. Here’s what the VV had to say:

For all you suckers who think you have to ditch
your responsibilities and move to a monk’s cell in order to realize
your dreams, consider the case of "Jon Brownstoner." The lonely force behind Brownstoner Media
has started four websites since October 2004, two of them indispensable
to Brooklyn. Meanwhile, he’s been holding down a job in the canyons of
New York finance and sharing in the raising of his two small kids.
Sleep? Ha. Sleep is for people who don’t know how to set up a new-media
venture. Sometime next year, he hopes to become self-employed, on his
own terms. For now, he can’t reveal his identity for fear of getting
fired. So he just keeps working on his projects whenever and however he
can. The earliest and oldest of his websites, brownstoner.com, draws
60,000 unique visitors a month with its mixture of news and debate on
real estate developments, neighborhood issues, and renovations. The
latest, the news blog brooklynrecord.com, kicked off in April with a
paid employee; its monthly draw is now about 20,000 readers. Along the
way, he launched a Wall Street blog, underthecounter.net, and he
unleashed the full cattiness of real estate agents with the now much
curtailed brokerate.com. Brownstoner says he’s been surprised by the
range of people cruising through his flagship sites, just as he was
surprised by the viciousness of the brokers. "I overestimated the human
spirit," he says. Don’t underestimate him, though; watch for this guy
to go big in 2007. (Laura Conaway)