What explains Drudge’s reach?
In interviews with more than a dozen operatives — many of whom are rightly classified “Drudge-ologists” for their intimate study of the likes and dislikes of the man and the site — two major reasons are offered.
First and foremost, is the depth — and the quality — of Drudge’s readership. Drudge’s number of unique visitors is regularly touted but what is more important, in terms of his ability to drives news cycles, is that every reporter and editor who covers politics is checking the site multiple times a day.
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.
How can it be that, on the one hand, most national political reporters spend all day on the Drudge report, and, on the other, reporters pay insufficient attention to right-wing issues?
Update. Whoops, I see that there is an almost identical post at TPM. Oh, well.
