I heard that almost all DC political consultants check Drudge 10 or more times each and every day:
Didn’t Drudge break the Monica Lewinsky story?
Mike Isikoff from Newsweak originally got the Monica story, but his bosses spiked the story, for reasons you can guess at. One of Isikoff’s angry colleagues passed it to Drudge, who by then had already had a good track record and had become known as fairly fearless as a one-man operation operating out of a tiny apartment.
A high proportion of long-time Freeps were early Drudge fans, back when FR generally featured only maybe 30 threads per day and Matt’s followeship was maybe 5% of what it is today.
Matt was small enough that he could still go ignored (though followed) by the MSM, and it was maybe 10 months before MSM pukes finally relented and took up Drudge’s lead.
During that YEAR FR was full to the brim with consummate Monica Mess experts, who digested the tiniest new developments and compared notes, vaguely akin to the much later Benghazi matter.
Meanwhile the kneepadded Media eagerly slurped and guzzled up BJ/HRC’s latest essence.
It was like two parallel universes, side-by-side but unaware of one another.
You are sort of right. He was the first to publish it, and it put him on the map, but the rest of the story is that the real heavy lifting was done by people at another news source (Time maybe?) who could not get enough corroboration to have their editors publish it.
So, they gave the story to Drudge and he ran with it.