The multi-million dollar deal for Rainbow media to buy Gothamist and its family of local city blogs has fallen apart and, yesterday, the Village Voice wrote a post theorizing that most of the blame fell on an article and a tweet that Gothamist founder Jake Dobkin wrote criticizing Gothamist advertiser The New York Times. However, a source very close to the deal has told us that “90%” of the blame actually falls on a joke by Foster Kamer that was printed in the Voice. As we know, that joke already cost the Village Voice $1M, but now it seems it cost Gothamist more than $6M. This has to go down in history as the most expensive dick joke ever written.

Foster Kamer is a pretty great writer, and the Village Voice was likely thrilled to hire him from Gawker a couple of months ago. But in hindsight it appears that his first few weeks at his new job were pretty rough. How rough? Well…he may have cost them $1,000,000 by writing a post that made a nasty comment about James Dolan, the prickly owner of Cablevision, MSG Entertainment, and Rainbow Media. It sort of puts any new-job growing pains we’ve all had in perspective, doesn’t it?

Earlier this month, Gothamist founder Jake Dobkin went nuclear on the New York Times for its lack of innovation and abominable failure in the Metro space, calling Cityroom “a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist.”

How ironic, then, that just yesterday, the Times announced that it has partnered with NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to create The Local: East Village, a hyperlocal blog that will be produced by NYU and published on the Times’ site. It’s like they could tell the future!

Jake Dobkin, the publisher and co-founder of New York City local news blog Gothamist, will appear on a New York Times panel for executives on Thursday, moderated by Times media critic David Carr. But the mention of the Times as “a credible editorial resource” sent Dobkin off on a rampage of a response, berating the paper in an email that he also posted on his public Facebook.