I’m watching Gabriel Sherman of The New Republic discuss his piece on Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report on “Morning Joe.” According to Mr. Sherman, “Matt is still in the top tier of news sites that the mainstream media follow every day.” Tina Brown of The Daily Beast notes, “We love it when he links to our stuff.”
In his piece Mr. Sherman writes,
A decade after he burst onto the national scene during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Drudge remains one of the most powerful figures in journalism. 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.