Drudge Flash: The Best Links in Life Are Free
Drudge’s special report at this hour is actually a description of an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. What’s the deal with a special report when you can just link to the Journal, you may ask? For the very same reason Matt links to some publications and not others: it charges for content. Credited reports like Drudge’s, I wonder, might attract as many paying eyeballs to the publication as exclusive online access. But who knows?
One thing Matt Drudge has said might threaten his career is if all newspapers began charging for online access. And face it, how useful would the Drudge Report be if visitors couldn’t instantaneously access a story with a click of the mouse? Matt himself admits he generally reads only the first and last couple of paragraphs of a story. The only way I could see him adapting to an all-paid-content online media world is to synopsize other journalist’s stories into “special reports” like this one. How would that affect the site dynamic? Can you imagine how much of his time that effort would consume? Monitoring the news alone is a full-time job for him now.
Interestingly enough, within the context of the WSJ flash, he performs the functions of a conventional reporter.
by RegoPark - 4:07 pm
August 9th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Hello! Trade publications have paid subscriptions but they seem to be the only ones to pull it off — their content is so specialized their readerships will pay for online instant access to it. This tends to include full text of just-released government documents that cannot be obtained by professionals as quickly elsewhere, including from the government, for example.
I don’t know what is says that the WSJ advertises on the Drudge Report in Drudge’s primo top-of-the-page spot! It does mean the media world has been turned on its head, for one thing. But if the WSJ advertises on Drudge in his primo spot, and it does, and not the other way around, then I’m not sure Drudge has much to worry about in terms of MSM content all going subscription. Not going to happen. It’s the specialized content where media can do the charging (and MSM, trust me, is not specialized content).
August 9th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
I know that one newspaper in New Mexico went the paid-content route a few years back…I guess I’ll need to do a little research to see the current online status of local media across cyberspace…