Changing Station
By RegoPark
Contributing Blogger
Last entry sparked a dialogue on Drudge Forum between yours truly and the other “yours truly” here on Drudge Blog.
Lance: I definitely think Drudge is more mainstream now and has some of the same issues that news companies have. And I don’t think he’s truly “alternative” anymore. I still hear people like Jeff Jarvis refer to him as “alternative.” He’s somewhere in the middle now…
That got me thinking… If we agree Drudge is no longer alternative, why is that? Has Drudge really changed or has the news media adjusted its attitude toward him? Maybe it’s a mutual thing.
If you take Brian Lamb’s C-SPAN interviews as an example, he treats Matt like any other journalist. (I don’t know if he did when he first began to invite him on 8 years ago. ) To be fair, an on-air Drudge tête-à -tête (like an unedited, transcribed raw print interview) is a bit of a rarity and it’s difficult to gauge how the mainstream journalistic community really treats him across the board. But they realize he’s not going away, and it behooves them to accept him as a reality if not give him a forum.
In the first years of his fame, Matt Drudge was busy addressing basic issues of whether he was a “real” journalist, whether he was a legitimate news source, defending his Blumenthal lawsuit, defending his decision to leak the Lewinsky info and scoop Newsweek - a host of so many distractions that he no longer has to deal with. When the Fox News show didn’t work out and Matt wouldn’t compromise his autonomy to keep it, it was heralded as “The Decline of Drudge.” I think the historical ramifications of what he was doing distracted him as well as the rest of us. Nowadays, with a successful radio show and a site that’s nicely sustaining itself, he still gets derided as a right-wing tool or a gossip or by making a story out of a non-story (i.e. Alexander Polier, Chris Rock) but he’s not juggling nearly as many philosophical balls in the air.
I often see online comments that he isn’t what he used to be — that now all he does is post links, that he’s obsessed with everything from the weather to Democrats’ sexual peccadillos to photos taken out of context. Now, I’ve followed the Drudge Report for less than a year, and frankly, I’m more interested in the aforementioned “philosophical balls” than the content itself. I suspect, however, that the perceived decline is really a reflection of readers’ expectations of what Matt and his site is supposed to represent. True, anybody can do what Matt does if they have the time and commitment. He happened to be the trailblazer, and it’s a bit challenging to catch up with him. But once that ceiling has been broken and the rubber marks are left in the driveway, then what? Matt keeps on keeping on, but the eyeballs in cyberspace are gradually becoming more aware of brand attributes that have, for the most part, been there all along. Of course, it’s a different world from the 1995 when he quit his day job to work the site full-time. But how different is he, really?
Matt isn’t as much of an outsider as he used to be, but neither is he part of the mainstream media. Since he pretty much paved the way for the bloggers (a term he hates), webbloggers (better, Matt?) will soon enjoy at least a little more respectablility than he did in the early days because their value and role has been figured out. Also, Matt was initially thought of as a gossip. I’d say he has decidedly more power and clout than the webloggers, but still in the “citizen journalist” camp. I see him somewhere in the middle of the respectability continuum - still an outsider, just no longer a pariah.
Has Matt Drudge, in fact, changed? He can do his job more efficiently. He’s richer. He has, as I pointed out last entry, friends in high places. He’s gotten comfortable, but he clearly loves his work and no one forces him to put in 15 hours a day (the number he quoted last Sunday night). But Drudge Report is still the place to go if you want to anonymously leak a story to the news media. Sure, you can start your own site, but Drudge is where a scoop will get exposure — at least today. The Drudge Report isn’t a news organization - it’s one guy, no bureaucracy. A wholly different corps of pros and cons from, say, the New York Times. No one forces him to withhold a story, but I’m sure his relationships with newsmakers affect his decisions to cover or link it.
His basic M.O. is still there. Like he said in the C-SPAN interview last month and in a few others, he isn’t sure how long he will last, anyway. People could tire of him, something else could come along to outshine or supplant him, a major computer virus or online news sources charging for content could throw a monkey wrench in it all. I don’t think he’s changing what he does for anyone or anything. He’s enjoying it while it lasts, and it’s not so much Drudge that’s changed as our own perception of him.
by RegoPark - 8:53 am
I think there are lots of bloggers out there who have replaced Drudge as the new alternative media.
Hmmm, I’d be careful about using the word “replaced.” That’s like saying e-mail replaced the fax machine. The blog is a more recent step on the evolution of “alternative media”. The Drudge Report isn’t the newEST, but it’s definitely current and viable, with its own niche, and it’s still alternative no matter how legitimized it may be by some mainstream journalists. Blogs and clearing houses (for a lack of a better definition of what Drudge is) have their own functions. As alternative media evolves, there will be different twigs sprouting off of different branches off the same trunk. I think it’s the weblog form itself, not the individual bloggers, who have “replaced” Drudge as the next new thing, but haven’t duplicated the function.
See it like continental drift plate tectonics. Drudge Island is shifting ever so slightly towards the Mainstream Media Continent because his success has made his work logistically easier, and he’s not a pariah anymore. That leaves an archipelago of little Blogger Islands left far off the mainland.
To further this geographic analogy, I see the different branches of the mainstream press like Europe and Africa. The bloggers are like the Canary Islands and Cape Verde Islands, far out in the Atlantic Ocean. Drudge is like an island in the Mediterranean Sea. At first, he was like the Canaries. Now he’s like a large, independent island in the Mediterranean (which is enclosed on all but one side by the surrounding continents). The Huffington Post is like Malta, Corisca, Sardinia, or Crete - large islands owned by a country. He could be like them if he wanted, but he doesn’t and isn’t.