Posted on 08/04/2007 12:54:04 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
WHEN Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner revealed in a recent column that he'd soon be changing his name to Christine Daniels, the piece quickly became the No. 1 draw on the newspaper's website.
From across cyberspace the readers came. Overwhelmingly, they arrived after spotting this titillating link on a news site called the Drudge Report: "L.A. Times Shock: 'I am a Transsexual Sportswriter.' "
Hard not to click on that one.
"I knew this would play big in Los Angeles, but I was getting e-mails from Australia, Canada, Turkey, England, France, all across Europe," the veteran sportswriter says.
By day's end, the link to the column accounted for nearly 25% of visits to latimes.com — testimony not only to the power of Penner's confessional but also to the unrivaled influence of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge.
Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they'll have something that catches Drudge's fancy — or, as he has put it, "raises my whiskers." Most keep their fingers crossed that he'll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.
Drudge's following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news. With media organizations competing fiercely for online audiences, the whims of Matt Drudge can make a measurable difference.
Therein lies the irony.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
pingie
So this explains the connection between Drudge and Breitbart.
Thinking about it, this was well known before - but I thought he had jumped over to Huffington Post. Now he's back with Drudge.
John Ziegler on KFI had Breitbart on for an hour one night...it was pretty informative.
He hopes to create a site of video stories...so people can just select their own evening news cast from X many sources and have it all play concurrently.
He used to post here too - but his last message was about three years ago.
No doubt he still lurks here.
Some idiots who no longer post here because they got banned or just left in a huff were the ones who hounded Matt off FR. They said the most revolting things about him.
Some idiotic things were said, for sure. But I think the launch of Lucianne Goldberg’s site was a factor too.
By day's end, the link to the column accounted for nearly 25% of visits to latimes.com — testimonynotonlyto the power of Penner's confessional but alsoto the unrivaled influence of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge.
There, fixed it.
Drudge recently drove enough traffic to the UK's Guardian for it to start fancying itself as a global brand with the proviso that an uncomfortable truth get buried.
There is, however, a hefty snag: much of this traffic is of a “drive-by” nature. Online readers dip in and out of newspaper sites and are likely to reach them through search engines or news aggregators such as the Drudge Report (a huge source of online readers for UK papers, but one that critics say reaps parasitic profits for itself). In short, online readers are chronically disloyal. Thurman cites a study that found the average US newspaper website user visits it only two or three times a month. By comparison, those who stick with physical newspapers tend to read them every other day.
Last year a journalist emoted a rant that seems to capture fishwrap feelings about the "parasitic profits" mentioned above.
There’s more bad news. The meteoric rise of a million bloggers in their pajamas is maddening. These parasitic information gatherers leech onto the news content that your edit staffs produce, pay nothing to print newspapers or to staff overseas bureaus, yet steal huge chunks of your readership daily. The news business still hasn’t found a solution to the increasingly partisan nature of media organizations or its inexorable drift toward sensationalism, entertainment and shouting-to-be-heard.
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