Drudge Report
The Drudge Report is an American-based news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge, and run with the help of Charles Hurt and Daniel Halper. Prior to the 2020 United States presidential election, the site was generally regarded as a conservative publication, but its ownership and political leanings moved left in mid-to-late 2019. The site consists mainly of links to news stories from other outlets about politics, entertainment, and current events; it also has links to many columnists.
The Drudge Report originated in 1995 as a weekly subscriber-based email dispatch. It was the first news source to break the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal to the public, after Newsweek decided to "kill the story".
Origins
The Drudge Report started in 1995 as a gossip column focusing on Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Matt Drudge began the email-based newsletter from an apartment in Hollywood, California, using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories, sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. In its early days Drudge maintained the website from his home in Miami Beach, Florida, with help from assistants in story selection and headline writing. His first assistant was Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart, who described himself as "Matt Drudge's bitch", worked the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report, at the same time as running his own website, Breitbart News, which provided a conservative perspective for people in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. John Ziegler has said that Drudge blocked Breitbart from posting content critical of Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign for the US presidency.In May 2010, Drudge added former Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl to the Drudge Report staff. In 2011, he added to the staff Charles Hurt, most recently the Washington bureau chief of the New York Post and a columnist for The Washington Times. Curl, who served as morning shift editor, left the site in 2014 and, with Drudge's blessing, in January 2015 launched his own aggregator Right Read, for The Washington Times.
Drudge, who began his website in 1997 as a supplement to his $10 per year e-mail newsletter, received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that Jack Kemp would be Republican Bob Dole's running mate in the 1996 US presidential election. In 1998, Drudge made national waves when he broke the news that Newsweek magazine had information on an inappropriate relationship between "a White House intern" and President Bill Clinton—the Monica Lewinsky scandal—but was withholding publication. After Drudge's report came out, Newsweek published the story.
Content
The Drudge Report site consists mainly of selected hyperlinks to news websites all over the world, each link carrying a headline written by Drudge or his editors. The linked stories are generally hosted on the external websites of mainstream media outlets. It occasionally includes stories written by Drudge himself, usually two or three paragraphs in length. They generally concern a story about to be published in a major magazine or newspaper. Drudge occasionally publishes Nielsen, Arbitron, and BookScan ratings, or early election exit polls which are otherwise not made available to the public.In April 2009, the Associated Press announced that it would be examining the fair use doctrine, used by sites like Google and the Drudge Report to justify the use of AP content without payment.
On May 4, 2009, the US Attorney General's office issued a warning to employees in Massachusetts not to visit the Drudge Report and other sites because of malicious code contained in some of the advertising on the website. In March 2010, antivirus company Avast! warned that advertising at the Drudge Report, The New York Times, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and other sites carried malware that could infect computers. "The most compromised ad delivery platforms were Yield Manager and Fimserve, but a number of smaller ad systems, including Myspace, were also found to be delivering malware on a lesser scale," said Avast Virus Labs.
Design
The site's design has seen few changes since its debut in 1997. Drudge has experimented with temporary, relatively minor design tweaks, including using all black-and-white pictures for a period in August 2017 and using colored text for holidays instead of the standard black throughout the site's existence; in all cases, the basic layout remained consistent throughout its existence. It remains entirely written in unscripted HTML, with a mostly monochromatic color scheme of black boldface monospaced font text on a plain white background. The Drudge Report has been described by Cheryl Woodard, co-founder of PC, Macworld, PC World and Publish magazines, as "a big, haphazard mishmash of links and photos" and by Dan Rahmel as "popular despite a plain appearance".The Drudge Report website is simple and, according to Paul Armstrong of webwithoutwords.com, retro in feel. Jason Fried of Basecamp called it "one of the best designed sites on the web". It consists of a banner headline and a number of other selected headlines in three columns in monospaced font. Most link to an outside source, usually the online edition of a newspaper, which hosts the story. When no such source is available, either because the story is "developing", with little known details at the time, or is an exclusive scoop, a special page is created on the Drudge Report servers, which contains text and sometimes images.
Stories on the site are ascribed different levels of importance, which Matt Drudge rates at his editorial discretion. The Report almost always holds one major story above the masthead logo, usually just one sentence hyperlinked to the most important story of the day. Other stories surrounding the main headline can be found in the upper left-hand side of the page and link to more specific articles dealing with aspects of the headline story. The standard story, either the headline or links below the logo, is written in black.
The majority of stories are laid out in three columns beneath the masthead. At the bottom of each column are various links: newspapers and magazines in the left column, columnists in the middle column, and a collection of wire service links and miscellaneous links to archives, e-mail, site stats, and a box to submit anonymous tips at the right. "Weather Action," a static page of links to weather data, and "Quake Sheet," with earthquake monitoring, each have their own hosted page on the Drudge Report servers. The newest stories and those Drudge considers most important are in red, all under a single major headline in large bold type. For significant breaking stories, especially if they are still emerging, Drudge places art of a flashing red light on the screen.
Although the site initially featured very few images, it is now usually illustrated with five or six photographs. Generally the images, like the linked headlines, are hotlinked from the servers of other news agencies.
Political leanings
In 2009, Matt Drudge said that he is a conservative, but "more of a populist". Some had regarded the Drudge Report as conservative in tone, and it has been referred to in the media as "a conservative news aggregator". In 2008, Richard Siklos, an editor of Fortune magazine, called the Drudge Report a "conservative bullhorn". Peter Wallsten, writing in the Los Angeles Times, labeled Drudge a "well-known conservative warrior". Saul Hansell, writing in The New York Times, referred to him as a "conservative muckraker"; and Glenn Greenwald was quoted in New York magazine in August 2007 as calling him a "right-wing hack".In 2008, Jesse Swick of The New Republic noted that the Drudge Report frequently linked to stories that cast doubt upon global warming. " loves a press release from Senator Inhofe almost as much as he loves taking pot shots at Al Gore... It's like flashing tasty images of popcorn and sodas between frames at movie theaters, only much less subtle." Ben Shapiro wrote, "The American left can't restrict Internet usage or ban talk radio, so it de-legitimizes these news sources. Ripping alternative news sources as illegitimate is the left's only remaining option—it cannot compete with the right wing in the new media... They call Matt Drudge a muckraker and a yellow journalist."
In 2015 and 2016, Drudge repeatedly featured pro-Trump headlines during the Republican Party presidential primaries, leading Salon and Politico to describe Drudge as "all in" for Trump. During the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump of 2019, the Drudge Report began aggregating what CNN Business called "an overwhelming amount of negative news for the Trump White House". CNN speculated that this meant there had been a falling out. In 2019, Rasmussen Reports reported that Matt Drudge had sold the site and was no longer involved in its operations, which would also explain the change in editorial direction; however, that reporting was not confirmed.
By 2020, some prominent conservatives—including President Donald Trump—had concluded that the Drudge Report had abandoned its alleged conservative ideology, with Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson stating, "Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive left." In 2020, Austrian social scientist Christian Fuchs of the University of Westminster described the Drudge Report as an alt-right website.
Business model and viewership decline
Matt Drudge's business entity in Florida is a privately owned limited liability company called Digital, LLC. Drudge applied for and was granted a U.S. Trademark registration for the phrase "Drudge Report" on January 15, 2019, filed on May 15, 2018. The registration excludes the word "Report" from protection outside of the exact two-word phrase use. It is for "standard characters without claim to any particular font style, size, or color."Revenue for the Drudge Report is driven by advertising that was managed for 20 years by Intermarkets, Inc. During the summer of 2019, after many years of being known for "changing nothing" about the website, Drudge advertising shifted to a new company by the name of Granite Cubed. The current ownership, strategy and outlook for the Drudge Report is held close as private information.
In October 2019, the Drudge Report began linking to articles which were increasingly critical of Trump, reportedly the result of Drudge himself becoming "exasperated" by the president. This coincided with a near 30% decrease in traffic metrics for the Drudge website in the last months of 2019—from a 90 day-ago ranking of #637 in global internet engagement as of July to #844 in December. The site's readership briefly rebounded in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic escalated. Still, it continued to decline to new record lows as the year went on.
After a Comscore data report showing a year over year decline of 38 percent from August 2019 to August 2020, President Trump tweeted, "Such an honor! Drudge is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he's bleeding profusely, and is no longer "hot". But others are! Lost ALL Trumpers."