By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Okay, so I really wanted to do something significant for the big day. You know, a moment of silence…a public party at a bar in D.C. or New York…bake Matt my famous spice cake…(except it’s Passover this week and I don’t have any flour but matzah meal in my house, so he would’ve had to settle for matzah brei with ten candles somehow secured upright…)

In fact, I really wanted to write a longer, better blog entry. Still working on that essay debunking bogus Drudge rumors and explain why all those holes matter in the media doughnut…but what with vacation and the holiday and another out-of-town trip next week, well, I’m at a loss for the right words. I wanted to talk about the legacy of the Drudge Report, say something new, different, more astute than the messages fed us by the mainstream media…more thoughtful and calculated by the mob of the blogosphere. But what can you do when you have unexpected deadlines that won’t take a holiday?

I wanted to add some obscure links to give readers who don’t yet have the big picture on the guy behind the blaring headlines. I wanted people to benefit from the knowledge I accidentally acquired during this year’s research project (that novel again). You know….the raw interviews, the funny pics, the rare portraits…I wanted to do a particularly thorough job this week of searching the unGoogle-able links. But alas, today you’ll have to settle for today’s Washington Post.

Sorry, Matt. Sorry, guys. You’re going to have to settle for a half-ass 10th anniversary salute. On this momentous occasion, the thought is really going to have to count.

But I won’t feel too bad. Apparently, Drudge slept in on the big day, too.

Drudge celebrated his ninth anniversary last year on April 2, complete with what is probably the most palatable of his infamous hat photos. (Being from Nashville, cowboy hats carry a negative connotation for me, but horny red-state women in Wyoming who are attuned to what a real man is supposed to look like surely know better.) But when this April 2 rolled around, no fireworks or candles or ranch dude gear was in sight. Nice Jewish boy that he is, Matt was a little too worried about the Pope being on his deathbed.

Okay, hon. I’ll forgive your oversight if you’ll forgive me for not living up to my Drudge Analyst title. Just be glad we’re not married, because if you forgot our anniversary, you’d be eating your own prairie oysters for lunch with candles stuck in them.

Actually, the true “Drudge Report anniversary” is in question because the site got started gradually. In its embryonic stage, Matt’s scoops were grapevine whispers and confidential box numbers salvaged from garbage cans at his job in the CBS gift shop, posted on newsgroups. Readers wanted to be put on his “mailing list” which he decided he’d better put into existence. One reader turned into five which turned into ten which morphed into a hundred and (so on and so on and so on as that ’70s shampoo commercial goes) and the website, as Matt puts it, “practically launched itself”. The question is, when? It all began sometime in winter 1994, he’s celebrated April 2 as the actual day, but it’s the latter part of this month that the fanfare is really starting to crank up. Supposedly he’ll be on C-SPAN tomorrow.

Anyway, back to the grindstone. If we miss each other the rest of the day, happy anniversary, Drudgemuffin.

RegoPark is a writer working on a novel about PR and the alternative media.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Just back from vacation and Passover and catching up on entry items…but wanted to alert everyone that Drudge said he’d be on C-SPAN at 8 Eastern (I think 8 a.m., but was very sleepy while tuned into the radio show. The Drudge Report is turning 10 years old this month, if one uses the same timeline…

Just a note that I moved Drudge Blog to a new server. It was painless and there shouldn’t be any issues. The site should load a bit faster now.

I’m mystified as to why Matt Drudge didn’t cover the Lance Armstrong retirement story yesterday or today. I know he chooses what to post, but this story should have been right up his alley. He posted some pretty trivial stuff yesterday to have not even mentioned the Armstrong story. CNN was the first place I saw it break. Not developing…

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Just a quick note before I go out of town for a few days…I want to thank Cathy Seipp for the info on Andrew Breitbart, whom we now know puts in 22 hours a week at Drudge Report.

At the same time, this past blog gave me a vaguely sinking feeling…am I succumbing to the same alarmism as so many others in the blogosphere and mainstream media? But I do find this issue compelling.

As you regulars out there know, I’m neither a Drudge disciple nor a detractor…just an analyst with a strange panache for dispensing that Jewish mom/tough love that Matt sorely needs when he’s out broadbanding in his moveable newsroom.

RegoPark is a writer with a background in marketing communications.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

At our sister site, Drudge Forum, where someone in power has seen fit to knight me Drudge Analyst, I once posted a thread asking “What Would You Like to Know / Understand About Drudge?” By far, what inquiring minds most want to know is how Matt possibly has time to do efficiently operate his website and have a life. Part of my multi-pronged reply was, he doesn’t have as much of a “life” as Joe Average would describe it. He’s said that the “media is his mistress” and that his social life is “zero”. In his 1998 Playboy interview, he said that he didn’t have a family and was starting to long for one. He’s told the Washington Post that he was still lonely. So.

Another answer is, Matt Drudge can afford to streamline his operation to the max. Since he lives on the beach, it’s more convenient to come and go in complete privacy. Every article I read about his newsroom boasts of multiple computers, TVs, a constantly running police scanner, and, of course, his phone. While he certainly had much of that setup in his obscure years, he can now afford hotel rooms with high-speed Internet and, most recently, install broadband in his car.

The third answer points to his one and only assistant, Andrew Breitbart…Hollywood expose writer who describes himself in Reason as “Matt Drudge’s bitch.” Of all the press articles in my archives, I still hadn’t found a firm answer to how much the Drudge Sidekick actually contributed to the site….until now. Press coverage of Andrew has described him as the Drudge “Webmaster”, but in articles that focus on Matt, it’s unclear whether Andrew updates the site only when Drudge is “sleeping or on vacation” or works every day. (And Matt gallivants a bit - in the past ten months, without trying to, I’ve gathered that he’s at least been to Vegas twice, as well as Southern California, New York, and London. )

So how dependent is Matt upon his boy Friday? And given the logistics of running the site, what would it take to throw a monkey wrench in the works?

Following up with this week’s story, I did a little more recent checking on this Drudge sidekick whom Arianna Huffington hopes to hire away for her upcoming blog enterprise. Andrew is actually a former researcher for Arianna, which makes the hoopla a bit less conspiratorial than the Observer and Washington Times intimate.

Let’s stop a second to update the scorecard:

Drudge: libertarian. Breitbart: conservative. Arianna: conservative-turned-liberal.

Huffington Report: a “culture and politics webzine in the classic mold of Salon or Slate.”
“It will have breaking news, a press commentary section called ‘Eat the Press’ and its most interesting innovation, a group blog manned by the cultural and media elite: Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown. That’s just to name a few, and Huffington is still recruiting,”(according to Business 2.0) and Warren Beatty (Observer)

Drudge Report: anti-media elite.

Arianna & Drudge: were definitely friends back in the 90s when she was conservative. She gave him at least one significant news tip. Don’t know their relationship now. She’s linked on his page, but then, so is Sidney Blumenthal.

Arianna & Breitbart: former employer-employee.

Drudge & Breitbart: old friends. Have worked together at least five years.

Drudge & ill-chosen ghostwriter Julia Phillips: old friends.

Breitbart quote on story: “There’s a lot of rumors out there that I cannot confirm or deny.” (Washington Times)

Drudge quote on story: “I’m the final edit. I have control on the Web site. I always have the final edit. My name is on the page.” (Observer)

One September 2004 blog profiled Andrew at home, where apparently he puts in at least 20, at most 24, hours a week. 9 to 2 every day? Hey, I can handle that! Considering that he’s Matt’s only employee and that Business 2.0 estimated Matt’s income at $800,000 a year that’s split with Andrew at an unknown proportion, it looks like a pretty cushy gig to me. He has plenty of time to write books like Hollywood, Interrupted…and unlike Matt, Andrew has three kids and family responsibilities.

Can you see someone like Drudge operating his site and having a significant significant other, let alone raising children? You have to delegate at some point - and by that I don’t mean “Honey, I’m using the computer and the TV and the phone and the other computer. Could you go into the kitchen and get Daddy a beer?”

At any rate, if Drudge has trusted 20-24 hours’ worth of work to a skilled researcher/writer who has all the relevant passwords and site infrastructure, et. al. who is not offering a straight answer to the press about whether or not Arianna is “in the process of hiring” him, then he has reason to worry — and regroup. Not that the Huffington Report is likely to be genuine competition — it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, in my opinion — but because there’s a lot to be said for doing a little study of the soft science of human resources. When it comes to your livelihood, you gotta keep your enemies close and your friends at a distance. Or something like that.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Hot Drudge headline/graphic of the morning: Data broker LexisNexis said Tuesday that personal information may have been stolen on 310,000 U.S. citizens, or nearly 10 times the number found in a data breach announced last month. All the ingredients to capture Matt’s attention: personal privacy issues, hacking, not to mention the fact that he himself claims to check LexisNexis daily (he’s a subscriber, and it’s expensive) to read the articles about himself.

Before you snicker there, let me assure you as a PR person that if Matt does not have his own PR professional, “ego-surfing” is exactly what he should be doing. In fact, someone really needs to monitor “rogue sites” like Drudge Retort and…you guessed it…DrudgeBlog and its sister site, Drudge Forum. In fact, someone with Matt’s best interests at heart (paid or unpaid) needs to stay abreast of potentially damaging rumors or misunderstandings. The nature of the beast is that any unidentified, fairly untraceable person can post a rumor anywhere without getting sued.

But if he doesn’t have a competent PR contact (and for reasons I’ll get into later, I don’t think he does) he needs a “minuteperson” monitoring his presence on the Web - alert, vigilant, and careful not to step over government-planted ground sensors.

On a day where there are no big stories, there’s a plethora of small ones for Drudge to cover. I suppose that’s why he’s avoiding a main headline right now. And it’s also good to know that Matt Drudge errs just like the rest of us: The small headline list of links about Israel up top go to a page on MyWay that doesn’t exist or has been moved. Link

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Like Sir Elton in the song with the above title, Drudge lent a public nod to a friendship with a Philly-based celebrity. Anyone who didn’t catch his on-air interview with arts professor Camille Paglia missed quite a show last night. Break Blow Burn, which Drudge plugged on his site, has jacked up to #14 on the New York Times bestseller list and I’m actually going to check it out even though I have a feeling most of those poems are at home (I was a college English and philosophy major).

So much for Drudge being a “right wing show/website”. For the full-frontal details, check out last month’s rundown on Paglia’s book…and a fabulous 2003 interview with Paglia and Drudge in Radar Magazine.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Even though I’m the one with the affinity for the New York Observer (I try to do an individual “Drudge” search on that site every week), Lance actually beat me to this one.

Would that I had time for a full essay on this, but I’m still trying to work on the essay debunking allegations about Drudge from people like David Brock, who is profiled in this story as having “compiled a 33-page dossier on Mr. Drudge” saying, “We try to function not as a Drudge, but as an anti-Drudge,” he said via e-mail, “which leaves plenty of room for a progressive knock-off of Drudge.”

That reminds me of what first got me reading the Drudge Report. I was following the Lewinsky scandal so closely (note the sarcasm here) that I didn’t realize until years later that Drudge was the smoking gun that catalyzed it all. A few years ago, however, I was looking for freelance projects under Craig’sList and saw a posting for the Raw Story — touting itself as a “liberal alternative to Drudge.” Of course, that’s a corps of hired freelancers vs. one to two people…I think Drudge still comes out ahead there! Plus we’ve got all the Drudge knockoffs — the Drudge Retort, maybe the Smudge Report is still operating. So with all due respect, I think the liberal alternatives have already been attempted in some form or other.

A couple of comments on this piece:

Choire Sicha, Gawker founder, is the temporary Wonkette substitute for Ana Marie Cox, who’s taking time off to write a novel.

Matt has been friendly with Arianna Huffington for some time — she gave him the tip on the Arlington Cemetery scandal several years ago, as noted in Drudge Manifesto.

Matt has posted stories for Mark Halperin, as noted in Drudge Manifesto and as I described in my second DrudgeBlog essay, “Excitable Boy”.

Need I say it? The whole labeling of Drudge as a right-wing site has been discussed in this blog already. So the whole premise of this story is a bit presumptuous.

It would be mighty interesting for Drudge’s assistant to go work for the Huffington Report. Actually, the only way I can imagine Matt’s so-called “competitors” to put a dent in his machine is to pirate away his one and only assistant. Keep in mind that Andrew Breitbart is a good friend of his who gets a split of the hefty Drudge profits. My impression of all I’ve read in my massive little Word document on my computer, “MD research” (I like to highlight Matt’s actual quotes in yellow) is that he tends to work with people he knows well even though they might not be the best choice. Case in point, his Drudge Manifesto co-author Julia Phillips.

As Matt would say (and as the Observer says), “Developing…”

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

After a week of prayers, vigil, crowd control, and speculation on his succession, His Holiness Pope John Paul II…

…is still dead.

Yup, he’s holding up pretty good with all he’s been through in a month. Takes a licking and keeps on…

…well, let’s just say he’s holding up okay. A real trooper.

And the Schiavo story still won’t go away.

Somewhere up in the clouds, Terri and Karol are comparing notes and having a mighty interesting conversation about all of this.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

Apparently you’re not cool if you’re not in Rome this week. Matt reports this afternoon in one of his own stories (i.e. not a link to another source) that J.P.II’s would-be assassin wants a seat at his funeral, if Turkey’ll let him out of the joint where he’s serving time for other transgressions. Prince Charles is postponing his wedding a day to see and be seen; Camilla herself won’t make it. All these people waiting all these days for him to die — now they’re lining up for a pew seat. Did they pay him that much attention in a typical season when he was alive?

Karol certainly deserves the tribute; it just smacks a little too much of Schiavo Part Two. If another hot news story rocked the mainstream media right now, you’d see how quickly the news vans would empty out of Vatican City. Why, there’d be enough room to let Sinead O’Connor past the velvet rope.

Dang, I’m cynical this week. Too many vigils, too little time.

By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger

A day of transition here at Drudge Blog. Lance is switching servers and I’m finally getting around to writing a long (and long-promised) essay debunking the Matt Drudge gay rumors — and why you, I, and non-gossip aficionados should care about them. One of my favorite habits is dissecting rumors, especially the ones that have been accepted as fact. In the meantime…

I thought I’d take this opportunity to post a “Drudge Short” — a tiny little factoid/observation that can’t fit tidily into an essay or time-specific blog posting.

The Gutenberg Drudge

If you’re a stickler for streamlined graphic Web presentations, chances are you’re not passin’ the bandwidth at good ole Drudge Report. Interestingly enough, I’ve noticed that the very top of a typical front page on a typical day employs a “Gutenberg diagonal” layout to create a simple progression effect. In advertising lingo, a Gutenberg diagonal is a visual path that causes the reader’s eye to follow it from the upper left comer to the lower right corner of a page. Of course, if Matt really knew or cared about what he was doing, he wouldn’t scrunch the top photo, the below headline, and the Drudge Report logo together so closely.

Check out today’s page to see what I mean. The first hyperlink you see is on the upper left hand corner, trailing off with consecutive periods (…), below which is the front photo, which opens out into the list of links.

What with all the red that graced today’s DR front page at 8:30 CST(dead pope, live cardinal, tiger cubs romping around a red floor) it resembled an illuminated Gutenberg manuscript…

By Rego Park
Contributing Blogger

Apparently no one reading headlines about Jane Fonda’s latest interview, in which she expressed regret over fooling around on-camera on antiaircraft artillery on her Vietnam tour, noticed or remembered a key detail:

She already apologized for all that in 1988…with Barbara Walters!

The same points covered with Lesley Stahl were already broached with Baba Wawa: She’s very proud of some things, like standing up for her principles, and is very sorry for some things that in retrospect she realizes were thoughtless and carried more ramifications than she realized.

Why has this just now become news?

I guess that if at first you don’t succeed in getting your message across, try, try again in another decade.

But don’t throw away your old news…recycle them! Martha’s retiling her pool. (Sorry, had to get that in. Hopefully everyone hasn’t forgotten that old credit card commercial, too.

Timed nearly perfectly on cue with Terri Schiavo’s death, the ailing pope story has taken the healm as the top story. Sometimes news in the real world syncs up just as you would script it. That being said, while I was weary of the Schiavo story, I was saddened by her death. It was good to have an end to her suffering though. I don’t take joy in anyone’s suffering, whether it’s the pope or just an average person such as Terri.

But the news rolls on.