Debunking the AP's Aggregation Aggravation

Online aggregators are financial vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the news business! You know — evil digital upstarts like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times. More »

The fall of Drudge is greatly exaggerated

Is the Drudge Report shrinking? One blog thinks so, and cites Alexa data — by far the most inaccurate of the website-measurement sites — to prove it. Is Drudge shrinking? No, but it also isn't growing as fast as some other sites, including the 3-year old Huffington Post. HuffPo has certainly grown its readership, recently passing 3 million unique visitors per month. But where it really matters — total visits and daily uniques, the number of people who come back every day — Drudge continues to dominate. All the more impressive, since Drudge maintains a tiny two-person staff, while HuffPo's fills a SoHo office. The sites compared by (more accurate) numbers: More »

Why bloggers should rejoice at being passed up for the Pulitzers

When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won. More »

Slobbering pup uncovers Digg's true purpose

I've always preferred editorially controlled news sources like Fark and the Drudge Report. I'm more likely to find links that I think are interesting. On "social news" sites like Digg, readers get endless Ron Paul and Apple links, as fanboys constantly vote for their preferred subjects. Occasionally though, something else makes it to the top of the social news pile. More »

Drudge launches mobile site, reports busiest month ever

The Drudge Report is the homepage for many news junkies — myself included. That's likely because Matt Drudge has never really jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon — no comments, no voting on stories, no submitting stories (except through the anonymous tips box) for peer review, no videos, no lolcats. The site has pretty much been the same since it launched in the late '90s — until today! More »

King of the bloggers

"Drudge, Drudge, Drudge. One can only imagine the particular kind of loathing the Dickensian music of that name must inspire in White House staffers," observed Steve Silberman a decade ago. Today, Matt Drudge curdles the whey of journalists and bloggers, too. At 16 million visits, a slow day on drudgereport.com is still an order of magnitude beyond the New York Times's website. Drudge even beats the 10 million or so auto-delivered daily to MSN by Internet Explorer (DISCLAIMER: I write for MSN. And you don't.) As the world's most-read standalone journalist, Matt Drudge makes Instapundit Glenn Reynolds — 198,000 daily visits — seem like a piker. So it always brings a smile to watch tech bloggers jockey for position. Robert Scoble, #43 on the latest hot list, gets props for publishing his blog's stats yesterday, but reality check: Even the Scobleizer's fan club measures under one-half of a millidrudge.

News blog Drudge Report doesn't list Fark.com on its blogroll of sources. But a tell-tale URL on a story about emigration from Britain shows that Matt Drudge does, in fact, read the edgy social news site. [Drudge Report]