In some cases, Drudgereport.com is an extremely important traffic driver. While Facebook never drove more than 8% of traffic to any one site, for instance, Drudgereport.com provided more than 30% of traffic to mailonline.co.uk (the British newspaper site the Daily Mail), 19% of the traffic to the NYPost.com, 15% to Washingtonpost.com and 11% to Boston.com and FoxNews.com.
Drudge Report Twitter
At the same time, Drudge remains one of the more reclusive and mysterious figures in the news business. Details about his operation, such as revenue and staff figures, are closely held. Drudge himself rarely makes public statements or gives interviews. He did not respond to a request for comment for this report.
"Lol I didn't even know Drudge Report was even still around," Lorenz tweeted on Tuesday in response to CNN's reporting. "I still think someone claiming to ruin my career on the Drudge REport is objectively hilarious! I know you're thirsty for media news, maybe u can report on someone claiming to destroy me on Geocities next."
Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz has been confronted with accusations of hypocrisy as her story doxxing Libs of TikTok came just weeks after she sat down with MSNBC about online harassment she has experienced, sharing violent threats she had received and claiming she suffers from "severe PTSD" and had contemplated suicide. ((Photo by Eric BARADAT / AFP) (Photo by ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images) CNBC Television/YouTube/Screenshot)
The Washington Post previously released a statement defending Lorenz and her Libs of TikTok story, calling Lorenz "an accomplished and diligent journalist whose reporting methods comport entirely with The Washington Post's professional standards."
Although Drudge can certainly veer into the conspiratorial, the change to the Drudge Report's look this week is evidence of his intelligence and instinct, both of which have rarely led him astray. The Drudge Report launched as an email newsletter the early days of the internet and rose to prominence for breaking stories before the mainstream media reached them, with Drudge most famously pushing the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Reflecting on Drudge's outsized influence, former Politico editor Susan B. Glasser wrote of the moment as a turning point for political reporting: "The Drudge Report had proved beyond a doubt that the old gatekeepers of journalism would no longer serve as the final word when it came to what the world should know."
Mark Joyella is a five-time Emmy Award-winning reporter and news anchor for television stations in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and New York City. He's worked in cable news at CNN and Fox and his writing has appeared in Adweek, the New York Post, the Orlando Sentinel, The Dallas Morning News and Men's Health.
It was this DIY approach that influenced a whole new generation of young conservative reporters, including Andrew Breitbart, who began his career as an editor at the Drudge Report and went on to help found The Huffington Post before launching his eponymous site.
Earlier this year, at a fraught moment of the Democratic primary campaign, another card-carrying member of Weird Twitter, Matt Christman, parodied exaggerated reports of violence at the Nevada state convention in a satirical message.
In the case of Virginia Tech, Facebook users correctly identified all 32 of the casualties before the university released their names to the public. Apparently mindful of the damage of a falsely reported death, these users also challenged each other to verify their sources.
In the face of real-time weather reports on the ground in Florida to the contrary, the influential blogger and publisher of the Drudge Report, suggested Thursday in a series of tweets that the danger presented by Hurricane Matthew is all a liberal government conspiracy -- all to drive a point home about climate change.
Cohen confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that in early 2015 he paid the head of a small technology firm, John Gauger, to write computer script that would place multiple votes for Trump in an online poll of news broadcaster CNBC.
The Journal report said Gauger, who is chief information officer at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia, was paid over $12,000 in cash for the job, allegedly less than the $50,000 he was promised.
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