He paced living room of his apartment duplex, gathering its things: a digital camera, an iPhone, a black leather jacket.
"I'm about to get crushed," said, running his hands through his hair.
Then Mr. Cavanagh, 26, has pushed the three blocks to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St James — the place of meeting of the Association Gerritsen Beach property owners. It was earlier this month, and was the first time Mr. Cavanagh was back to the room great church meeting since November, when he exploded his relationship with the small district simmering block south of Brooklyn.
His blog, GerritsenBeach.net, was at the center of controversy. The day after Halloween, Mr. Cavanagh posted photos from the day before, adolescents throwing rocks, potatoes and other things to the cars, buses and people.
Packed in the basement of the church a few days later, exasperated neighbors Mr. Cavanagh has said that he was "destroying" neighborhood — that is, if he doesn't like the beach, he must leave.
Soon after, someone threw a pumpkin at the House of Mr. Cavanagh of the father. Girlfriend's car was scratched with a key. A man waited to confront Mr. Cavanagh outside a bar in the neighborhood, but a bouncer intervened.
"I was definitely the Messenger", said Mr. Cavanagh, "and were shooting the Messenger".
But he is a new type of messenger. Mr. Cavanagh, computer consultant, who was born and raised in Gerritsen Beach, started his blog in 2006 because her neighborhood — population around 5000 — was rarely in newspapers. Began covering the local meetings, photographing events and scenes of crime.
Like many bloggers, Mr. Cavanagh calls himself a reporter, and he shrugs off the standards of traditional media — a fact that has, in part, led to debate acute in this small community, where there are no underground lines and many families have lived for generations. Here, the blogosphere is seen as a creature of Manhattan.
Halloween post by Mr. Cavanagh recorded more than a thousand comments — the site gets typically 900 or so page views per day — and earned him the title "Vigilante bloggers" from Gawker.
But problems of Mr. Cavanagh had started long before. He points to "Gate of wood-Chip" — as Gerritsen Beach residents call it often — as the moment when they were drawn lines of battle.
In early 2009, Mr. Cavanagh has posted a couple of blog entries, and a video interview on what seemed to be dumped not quite-legal just off the main street of the neighborhood, Avenue Gerritsen, on land owned by the city's Parks Department.
The post's Michael Taylor, President of Gerritsen Beach Cares, or GB Cares, a local non-profit group. The Organization has had an affair with a contractor who, in exchange for a place to dump of wood chips, would allow GB Cares heavy equipment access for neighborhood projects.
But cares GB did written approval from the Department of parks, instead of relying, as often had, on a "handshake deal," as John Douglas, Chairman of the group, to put it.
The Department of parks, "Mr. Cavanagh recalls," saw my story and told GB Cares, "Whoa — you need written approval for anything on our park. ' That essentially crippled GB Cares. "
Mr. Taylor, the posts were attacks Cares GB and a betrayal of beach culture of volunteering. And he was furious that Mr. Cavanagh had not given the opportunity to speak before the items were recorded.
Mr. Cavanagh, places expressed as had always been done things on the beach. He has not spoken with anyone in your organization before submitting entries because Mr. Taylor had said his car "would end up in creek" If wrote about the project, he said. (Mr. Taylor said he doesn't "remember something like that.")
Approach of Mr. Cavanagh has raised questions about journalistic standards of the age of the blog, and Mr. Cavanagh reporting. Has published an interview with an employee of landfill sites, for example, but not told a worker that the conversation was from tape, that he was a blogger or that he could publish the interview on your site.
"Did not identify themselves as anything because I didn't and still don't really like, classify me nothing," said Mr. Cavanagh.
The views of professional journalists vary these tactics.
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