When Drudge Is A Genius
Is when you’re still up at 2 in the morning, alone in an empty apartment on a mattress, half-empty coke zero bottles scattered around the room, and sneakers inches away from your face that are beginning to smell like Chinese food, and you click on Drudge and you get that photo lay-out he has right now.
Sully
Andrew Sullivan gets at least half credit for this. That sentence is sublime.
“The idea that Condi Rice, an African-American conservative woman could team up with a white-guy Mormon to take on an African-American, left-leaning Democrat is just too delicious for reporters to ignore,” says Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN.
So why not do it? Why shouldn’t news outlets take the opportunity to pooh-pooh the story as a way of driving clicks and ratings? Simple, Sesno says. If they don’t, someone else will. “The question in newsrooms now is “if ‘so many have seen it, heard it, read it, tweeted it, how can we ignore it?’”
The Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn puts it like this: “They know Drudge is a monster traffic-driver and that even if they ignore his tasty tidbits, their rivals won’t.” Why is it that a site which hasn’t updated its approach since 1998 can hold such pull over so many other outlets in the pivot-on-a-dime age of Twitter? (ht Anthony De Rosa)
The man who had the most traffic to gain from yesterday’s news.
Washington Post cries foul on pew study: You may recall this research report by Pew, which claimed that Drudge Report (which, content aside, looks a lot like a Geocities page we made for a middle school project in the mid-90s) drove 15% of the Washington Post’s online traffic. David Carr even wrote a piece on the thing which feted Drudge. The folks at WaPo have responded, calling the report inaccurate and citing their own numbers, which credit 2.5% of their total traffic to Drudge. Pew used Nielsen data from three months in 2010, but three different companies working for WaPo failed to measure a percentage that cracked double digits over the same three months. source
One awesome wrinkle of the story we just posted: Apparently, Matt Drudge chose not to respond to e-mails from the NYT’s David Carr when Carr wrote about his site’s online traffic prowess. One thing he did do, though? Linked to the article in the top-right corner of his site, which is kind of the money corner, if you ask us. An amusing little detail.
I covered the Clinton White House in 1997 and 1998 and I would never have conceived that he would be an important player in the landscape 12 years later. He does one thing and he does it particularly well. The power of it comes from the community of people that read it: operatives, bookers, reporters, producers and politicians.Politico co-founder John F. Harris • Expressing his disbelief that Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report is a juggernaut that reportedly drives a solid 7 percent of the overall news traffic online — far more than headline-grabbing social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit. Why’s that? Simple. “[He’s] the best wire editor on the planet,” says The Atlantic Wire’s editor, Gabriel Snyder. “He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.” Even considering his conservative bent, his stone-age design and his low-key demeanor, the main reason Drudge is a success? He doesn’t change what works. Even if he runs what’s pretty much the Craigslist of journalism. source (via • follow)
So this motherfucker Matt Drudge is trying to tie back one of the most heinous military crimes ever committed by U.S. soldiers — under the Obama administration — to other disgusting, inhumane war crimes committed by U.S. soldiers under the Bush administration.
And how much of the Abu Ghraib scandal do you think Matt fucking Drudge covered on his fucking website?
Motherfucking shameless asshole dickwit fuck.
What inothernews said, minus the profanity because this is a family blog. But not enough of a family blog to edit out what he wrote.
Interesting via @BrianStelter
Surprising that it’s Glenn thinking of leaving, rather than other way. Still early though.
Welcome to Twitter, Matt Drudge, a guy who may be the only person on the planet to claim that Craigslist has a better site design than his, while still scoring similar traffic. Hey Drudge, we’ll buy you a book on CSS if you want it. It’ll make your site load faster. source
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