Drudge Report

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:56am on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Has Matt Drudge jumped the shark? Writing in the New York Observer on September 8, 2009, Gillian Reagan offers an answer to the question:

"For some, including the White House, the Drudge Report is still an online media powerhouse. The Drudge Report is No. 115 in Quantcast’s list of most popular sites, ranking higher than washingtonpost.com, nypost.com and politico.com. That’s 1.1 million visitors every day, each of whom refresh the page about 15 times in a 24-hour period, according to Quantcast.

But, contrary to what some might think, fewer and fewer of those visitors seem to be the journalists that were once so captivated by Matt Drudge—not to mention his vaguely terror-inducing headlines, taste for the obscure and occasionally spinning siren light. Is it because of increased competition online? Fewer scoops? Or simple Drudge fatigue?"

The full story:
http://www.observer.com/2009/media/are-days-drudge-over

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 11:37pm on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

In a study of the Drudge Report, Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois reports that over the past seven years the Drudge Report has linked to 103,472 stories and 2744 domains. Leetaru argues that the Drudge Report owes its existence to "old media:"

"The Drudge Report is one of the founding flag bearers of “new media”: a U.S.–based news aggregator founded in the late 1990s that has developed a reputation for breaking tomorrow’s news today. The site has become a powerful force in the U.S. media sphere and its founder was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in 2006. In existence for more than a decade, the Drudge Report makes an ideal case study for examining the “new media versus old media” argument. How dependent is such a “new media” aggregator on the “old media” it draws from, and how does it find its breaking stories? A cross–section of analytical techniques is used to demonstrate how to profile a news Web site, and finds that the Drudge Report relies heavily on wire services and obscure news outlets to find small stories that will break large tomorrow, making it highly dependent on mainstream “old media” sites."

The full study:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2500/2235

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:00pm on Thursday, May 28th, 2009

In an excellent opinion piece in the Miami Herald on May 26, 2009, Edward Wasserman (a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University) talks about Matt Drudge:

"The end began in January 1998, when Matt Drudge broke the story on his blog that linked President Clinton amorously to a young White House intern. At least that's how his scoop is remembered, as a signature moment in the growing dominance of online news. Except that's not what happened. Drudge didn't break the intern story because he didn't have it. What he reported was that Newsweek magazine had the story but wouldn't publish it.

Evidently somebody at Newsweek was fed up with the magazine's reluctance and told Drudge. I think that was the first time a major story went public after being back-channeled from reporters at a mainstream news organization to an unaffiliated website.

What Drudge's scoop really exemplified was the declining ability of news managers to control their staffs' access to the public. Today, 11 years later, thanks to the Internet most every journalist here can reach independently an audience immeasurably greater than the star reporter on the biggest newspaper or top-rated newscast could a generation ago. Now the traditional news business is built, one way or another, on a promise of exclusivity: What we've got you won't get elsewhere. So the idea that a media company's biggest threat may come from its own newsroom is hard for news managers to swallow."

The full article:
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1066006.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:29pm on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Newser founder Michael Wolff really doesn't like Matt Drudge, and he wants you to know it. Writing at Newser on April 22, 2009:

"The New Republic, continuing the political world’s odd obsession with the Drudge Report, says its editor, Matt Drudge, has disappeared, or gone into seclusion like some latter-day Howard Hughes.

I do not think Drudge has disappeared. I think he is dead. Certainly the Drudge Report, which the New Republic claims gets “20 million hits per day” (a meaningless locution as old-fashioned as the Drudge Report itself) has been on automatic pilot for several years.

If he is not dead, he is definitely brain dead. There hasn’t been a breaking story on the site in months. Drudge, once one of the most vaunted gossips in the nation, clearly isn’t in the loop. Or he is just bored to death. He had been doing this for a decade. It is the same old Drudge Report, without improvement or variation."