drudge blog

What’s enough to keep the Schiavo story and Jacko case off the main headline on Drudge Report? How about 2/3 of earth’s resources depleted? Drumming up a world crisis here. Nobody panic. Please remain seated for the duration of the flight.

*Update - It didn’t last long, Schiavo is back up there. Damn, this story won’t go away.

By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

One of the most common complaints about the Drudge Report is its ever-present pop-ups and other invasive commercialism… a distant memory to me since I’ve employed Mozilla Firefox (not a plug, although Drudge did give it some free PR on his radio show a week after my tech support guy installed it on my machine) but let’s just say I found some fingerprints on the murder weapon of my virus-felled computer. There were enough spiders on that baby courtesy of Matt’s “commercial benefactors” to spin an entire cyberuniverse of sticky cobwebs and keep my AdAware humming for a good part of the afternoon.

More or less noxious to past, present or potential Drudge readers is the prevalence of right-leaning products. The blogger Thought Criminal summed it up for many of us in this February 8 essay: “Every day, his website is littered with advertisements pushing books from conservative war-mongers like Ann Coulter. Now Drudge Report is little more than a Republican watering hole : a place to click on ads for the latest Republican merchandise (Ronald Reagan ball caps, Bush Sr. coffee cups, and whatever cheap junk that Drudge sees fit to whore out).”

I took the time to respond to Thought Criminal’s essay.

As a former media intern, and as someone who has read a lot of Matt Drudge interviews, it’s highly unlikely he micromanages what goes into his ads. Media buyers make the decisions about where to place a client’s ads and in what format. He is a friend of Coulter’s, but he’s certainly not interested in having too many heavy strings attached to his enterprise….I hate his pop-ups, but it’s my choice whether or not to buy a blocker. He’s not going to change his media out of sheer altruism, and most people won’t.

But after reading his response, I realized that there was still a lack of communication about how advertising works.

…I understand that very few webmasters have the time to micromanage every ad banner that gets served to their domain. However, as an aspiring journalist, one must be aware of how the news is presented. I have NEVER seen a single ad or banner selling any “liberal” associated book or product. Without exception, his advertisers are of the Republican/Right variety. This is no coincidence. I am sure Drudge visits his own page and it’s easy to see the prominent ads that push the conservative agenda. A blind man could see it. At no point did Drudge say to himself - “Hmmm, my site might be misinterpeted by some as having a rightwing bias?…What can I do to change that misconception and make my site more balanced?”

All I ask is that Drudge take control over his domain (if in fact he has little/no say in choosing his ads) and restore a sense of balance - accept and display some advertisements from the left.
OR, if he can’t do that for whatever reason, then I think the public deserves a good explanation. Otherwise he risks being judged and labeled as something he is not.

I’ll get to other subjects in TC’s essay in later blogs. But for now, I want to address the amount of control Matt has in his website advertising. You’re all free to disagree with Matt’s choices and politics, but understand how advertising works.

In a website with the traffic level of Drudge’s, and clients large enough to afford his ads, there are five degrees of separation in this scenario:

The client (Conservative Book Club, AT&T, whomever.)
The advertising agency account executive, who plans the marketing mix
The media buyer, who makes the decisions on how to spend agency money based on meticulous demographic assessment - not whom Drudge likes.
The agency who handles Drudge’s web ads (in this case, Intermarkets, who also sells Internet ads for sites like the Village Voice and the Chicago Sun-Times). Banner ads are rotated, as understand interstitials (the trade word for “pop-ups”) are.
The webmaster (Matt Drudge. With no staff, the buck stops with him. ) I don’t know the ins and outs of Intermarkets’ policy, but most media carriers can stipulate what type of ads will not be accepted; Good Housekeeping does not accept cigarette ads, for example.

Advertising is paid for. Anyone willing to pay for ad space who is not “disqualified” by the advertising medium (i.e. cigarette ads in Good Housekeeping) is free to do it.

Public relations is free, but publicity is in the hands of a reporter and editor. You can lead a horse to your website, you can send him a press release, you can e-mail him a tip, but you can’t make him drink it…or use the information. Matt Drudge gets thousands of e-mails a day…but somehow, he recently saw fit to plug the new book of his liberal friend, Camille Paglia, in a special report, and prominently display the book’s hot-pink graphic image on the site along with its link.

Matt will take advertising from almost anyone, but he can’t control who will choose to place it. If liberal clients were convinced by competent media buyers that a sizeable number of their target audience read the Drudge Report long enough and frequently enough to catch their advertising message, they’d run ads there. A media buyer wouldn’t even waste company time suggesting a Drudge Report ad placement. The more expensive the ad, the more careful the client’s media planning.

It’s not that Matt’s not accepting and displaying advertising from the left…for business reasons, their intermediaries aren’t accepting him.

In other words, Drudge would have to seriously go out of his way to find liberal advertisers…and considering that he spends most of his time each day monitoring the news, site, and massive e-mail, with no staff or social life, do you think he’s going out of his way to find more politically balanced advertising on his site?

Let’s look at how the Drudge Report is financed. Matt at first bragged that he carried no advertising because he wasn’t beholden to the powers that were who carried them. He changed that policy during the progress of Sidney Blumenthal’s $30 million lawsuit against him. The Miami Herald reported in 2003 that the site’s revenues come solely from advertising sold by Intermarkets. Drudge’s advertisers pay $3 per thousand impressions for banner ads, or $4,400 a day (discounted to $29,000 a week). Now, Matt was able to quit his day job and work on the site full-time when AOL and Wired paid him to run a column. Whatever income he generates now — and don’t you worry, boys and girls, he’s comfortably well-off — enables him to work when he wants to, afford the privacy and convenience he needs, and shell out judgment money next time he incorrectly reports that somebody beat his wife.

Think the public “deserves a good explanation” if he can’t take control over his domain? Well, we could all chip in and buy Matt a lifetime supply of Depends…but, oh, we found out in the last paragraph that he can afford his own Depends. One thing’s for sure in my own mind…if he had any reservation about being judged and labeled as something he is not, as TC puts it, he would have quit this ten years ago. Do be fair, he did tell Camille Paglia and Maer Roshan two years ago in a Radar interiview that he avoids getting too hardcore partisan for fear that he’d alienate readers. My guess is that he could be concerned about the right-dominated ads if he is aware of them (remember, he’s got his own Mozilla pop-up blocker) but isn’t going to rock his own boat to change things. He has accepted that he’s going to get “rhymed and slimed” — and indeed, he’s been the subject of rumors he could successfully sue for but has chosen not to. In a nutshell, the ad business and the misunderstanding along with it comes with the territory.

Do we have reason to be annoyed by the proliferation of political ads? Sure, why not? Do we have the right to complain about the pop-ups? Hell, yeah! Should we be, as Thought Criminal expressed, “frustrated to see another potentially-good source of news get co-opted by the right”? Well, let’s make sure we get the whole picture before we project our justifiable antsiness in the wrong place.

Still feeling queasy about all this interstitial overload? Download Firefox and e-mail me in the morning.

RegoPark is a pseudonym for a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

I apologize for the unbelievable site downtime. My web host has really dropped the ball here. I’ll be taking care of it as soon as possible. Please hang in there. I’ll post updates as things change.

OK, I’m officially tired of hearing about nothing but the Terri Schiavo case. Maybe Drudge is too. This is more like it on today’s Drudge Report:

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

If you haven’t read Drudge Manifesto, check out the excerpt here . Unfortunately, that’s the best part of the book. As many reviews point out, this is a combination of blank pages, fan mail, chapter title pages, pages containing only single words, etc. What flesh that lies between them might be charitably described as “mystery meat”. As I’ll explain, the meat isn’t even Matt’s.

“Co-written” by the late great Julia Phillips, producer of movies like The Sting and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and author of the Hollywood tell-all You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, the book nonetheless shot up into the bestseller charts and sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million copies, even though it received only one review in a major newspaper. Brett Sokol, who interviewed Drudge for the Miami New Times, reported that Drudge’s radio room in his apartment has a blown-up poster of the bestseller list with Manifesto circled.

As much as I like Drudge and as immersed as I once was in Beat poetry, even I’ve got my limits. Sorry, Matt, this thing is pretty damned hard to read. An ex-philosophy major, I had phenomenology and semiotics texts in college that were easier to get through.

It piqued my curiosity that the very same complaints about the run-on “poetic license”, et. al. were the same complaints Amazon readers had about Julia Phillips’ last book. So I checked it out. Yep. Just as I feared…

A few Manifesto “manifestations” are definitely Drudge: The content of the stories, the facts, some opinions, and the catchy corporate combos that pepper the text (”With this latest greatest urge to merge, it was not immediately clear if either the ABCNEWSWASHINGTONPOST Polling Unit or the CBSNEWSNEWYORKTIMES Polling Unit were headed for divorce or bigamy…”) which I recognize from reading his old AOL/Wired articles.

Then there’s this:

I come from a typical American family.

Dad, a social worker, shacked up with Someone New and moved to the east coast of Maryland. I stayed with Mom, one of the first women to graduate from ___ University Law School and pass the bar in Maryland. (My deletions, not Matt’s.)

Not entirely cool, I thought when I first read it. I mean, hey, confess your OWN sins, not your family’s. Especially when Dad helped launch your career with that first computer a few paragraphs later. Especially kind of stupid when he told Playboy two years beforehand, in response to the question, “What did your parents do for a living?”

Drudge: I’m protecting my parents all the way. Since the White House has been using private investigators, I haven’t been talking about my parents. Since this lawsuit blew up, I don’t even see them when I go to Washington. It’s probably the smart thing to do.

Drudge: For my parents? no. I’m more concerned with the private investigators and the White House slime machine. What they did to Linda Tripp — going into her arrest record 30 years ago. I don’t want to bring my parents into the middle of this.

Well, at least one mystery has been solved:

The whole thing - cutesy literary schtick, difficult-to-read format, bad, bad poetry — is pretty much all Julia Phillips. If you’ve read You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, it’s a little in the same annoying vein, although she didn’t really pump up the volume until her follow-up book, Driving Under the Affluence. I just read the latter book and yep, the spittin’ image of what you see in the pages of Drudge Manifesto are here. Even certain key phrases: “Information being power and all.” Not the least of which is her Mom complex which followed her through both books. You read more about her dear dead neurotic Mom in the 615 pages of Lunch than any of the celebrities she name-drops.

So now that I feel a little bit better about the possibility that Matt respects and cares about his parents, and remembering how little time he would have to write this literary tchotchke (teach yourself a vocabulary word if you don’t know what it is), I’m confronted with the whole Platonic dilemma again: Where did Socrates end and Plato begin? How much is the teacher’s actual teaching and how much the student’s interpretation?

To answer this, I returned to the 1998 Playboy interview:

I’ve never done a term paper and wouldn’t know how. I wouldn’t know how to write anything more than two or three paragraphs, little bites. If I had to actually form a story from beginning to end I don’t think I could do it. Everything I’ve learned about reporting I’ve learned on the Internet.

But that’s not the only mystery meat in this repository.

In culling the resources on the Web, I made a point of comparing the complete online transcript of Drudge’s speech at the Washington Press Club with the excerpt of the subsequent audience Q&A printed at the back of Drudge Manifesto. Now, some editorial deletions were obviously called for: the speech itself reiterated the stories and points MattJulia made at the beginning of the beginning of the book. Details like “one year later there would be (advertising)” are included not as footnotes but inserted parenthetically in the text. The book version of the transcript has Matt saying “I forgive you” in sotto voce, perhaps echoing a previous chapter when he’s watching TV at New Year’s 2000 and symbolically “forgives” everybody who trashed him. Then, there are a few things that were deleted from the transcript. One of them was Matt’s statement that he knocked on Monica Lewinsky’s door. Two sentences completely removed from the Q&A.

What’s that all about? Any ideas?

In a nutshell, this is what happens to a book when an author is in a seller’s market. You may remember in a previous entry that New York reported Matt bulldozed the publisher into letting him do an audio recording of Drudge Manifesto with flutes and drums in the background. Drudge reported himself in another interview that Random House had approached him with a book deal, and presumably Penguin Putnam, the book’s ultimate publisher, wasn’t in a position to drive a hard bargain.

Also keep in mind that Julia Phillips was a friend of Matt’s. It’s interesting to note that her last book revolved around her huge IRS debt, and that she died of cancer in January 2002, less than two years after the book saw completion. I also recall another friend of his, Ann Coulter to be exact, telling the Washington Post that he likes to give money to friends because he doesn’t know what to do with it. So it’s arguable that he outsourced the job to someone who really needed it. Not that Drudge and Phillips are totally on separate wavelengths…my feeling is that they shared a good long laugh over this million dollar confessional Beat baby.

Don’t misunderstand me — Julia was an interesting woman, and I’m sorry that she’s gone and that Matt lost one of his few friends — but after reading the two Phillips Manifestos, I know what we really got here bears very little resemblance to the ghostwriter’s subject. Indeed, Drudge is no micromanager. He admits he’s the “worst marketer out there. I just don’t care. I put all my energy into the site…” My unsettling question is, did he look at ANY of this? Obviously the editor didn’t have or exercise a great amount of control here. (If he/she had, the style might have worked in the end.)

The bottom line is that this book was totally outsourced - and Matt’s oft-refreshing lack of perfectionism really came back to bite him in the buttocks. But not really — it did what he invariably hoped it would accomplish. It made relatively effortless money, perpetuated his visibility and validated him in the media. What the book doesn’t do, alas, is give anyone an idea to who the hell Matt Drudge really is.

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications. She is currently writing a novel on PR and the alternative media.

Looks like Drudge missed the BP refinery explosion in Texas. 100+ injured, 14+ dead, massive blast crater. I would have guessed he’d be all over that one. “Massive Blast Rocks Refinery” or the like… Unless it was briefly mentioned earlier and I couldn’t find it on the timeline in the DR Archives…

*Thursday - Update - I never saw coverage of this explosion on the Drudge Report. I find this particularly weird. If I missed it and someone else caught it, let me know.

Drudge has a couple of items that interest me this morning, items that you might not even hear about anywhere else today. He’s headlining the fact that aging, ailing Rehnquist may not support Schiavo’s right to die. And then there’s a cloning story, a favorite of Drudge. The first cloned buffalo is born over in China. It’s not surprising to me at all that the cloning story is grouped just under the Schiavo headlines. Life, death, and cloning…

The Terri Schiavo story is a hot one today, as is the teen shooting spree. As they are both “in motion,” they’ll get moving coverage all day on the Drudge Report. And right now both warrant red headlines. As I’m typing this, the Schiavo story has already moved down into the left column and the teen shooter takes up the red in the main spot. Red headlines don’t usually last too long, but following them assures that you’re in with the hot story of the day. Or just the hot one for a few moments…