Drudging Along, Quietly

Washington D.C. is currently buzzing over the increasingly reclusive nature of one Matt Drudge, the “Internetist” whose eponymous website has been driving political news coverage for the better part of the last decade.

Drudge hasn’t made a public appearance since he showed up at Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s concession speech last July, a rare surfacing of “the man, the myth, the legend” – a guy who has leveraged/ managed/ exploited America’s changing news preferences into an unprecedented media power base.

Why do people care so much about where Drudge is?

Easy – his news aggregation website gets 20 million hits a day.

From The New Republic:

In the Web 2.0 era–with media outlets unveiling increasingly complex sites that feature multiple avenues for readers to contribute, from comments to Tweets–the Drudge Report doesn’t look like much: just an old-fashioned layout consisting mostly of links to articles in other publications, alongside the occasional breaking news story of its own. And yet, because it draws up to 20 million hits per day–and, more importantly, because it is read religiously by Washington’s reporters, political operatives, and cable news producers–the site retains a striking ability to dictate what appears in the mainstream press. Indeed, one of journalism’s unofficial parlor games these days consists of mining Drudge’s site for clues to his proclivities–so that one might figure out how to gain his favor and earn a valuable link.

We’re not regular readers of Drudge here at FITS. In fact, we probably make it to his site once a month – but that doesn’t mean we’re not influenced by the stories he chooses to highlight or ignore.

In fact, that’s the basic premise – whether you read Drudge’s site or not, he’s influencing the information you consume on a daily basis.

Pretty heady stuff for a guy who has “gone quiet.”

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