drudge report website design

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Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web

A couple weeks ago on Twitter I said : “I still maintain the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Has been for years.” A few people agreed, but most didn’t. Some thought it was a joke. I wasn’t kidding.

To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose. However, I still think that the Drudge Report is an aesthetic masterpiece even though I also consider it ugly. Can good design also be ugly? I think Drudge proves it can.

Here are a few reasons, in no particular order, why I think The Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web.

Staying power

People talk about timeless design all the time. But most things people point to that are timeless end up being time stamped. The Drudge Report, on the other hand, has proven timeless. It’s generic list of links, black and white monospaced font, and ALL CAPS headlines have survived every trend, every fad, every movement, every era, every design do or don’t. It doesn’t look old and it doesn’t look new — it looks Drudge. It hasn’t changed since at least 1997, and I believe the design goes back even further. How many sites can survive — and thrive — unchanged for a decade? That’s special.

It’s straightforward

There are no tricks, no sections, no deep linking, no special technology required. It’s all right there on one page. “But it’s a mess!” you could say. I’d say “it’s straightforward mess.” I wouldn’t underestimate the merit in that.

It’s unique

When you’re on the Drudge Report you’re on the Drudge Report. There’s no question where you are. The design has become iconic. How many other news sites can claim that? If you pull the logo off some of the other major news sites/networks ( CNN , MSNBC , FOX News , ABC News , CBS News , etc.) you may have a hard time distinguishing them from one another. They all sorta blend into the same standard news-site look and feel. There are a few standouts, but even the NYT and the WSJ aren’t that unique. Drudge’s design stands alone.

This is important

Many news sites have lost their balls. They’re afraid to really call out one big story. They may have a leading headline, but it’s not all that obvious or different from the others. It may be a font size or two bigger, but it’s not confident. They hedge. Drudge, on the other hand, says “this is the story of the moment” with a huge headline. This is what’s important in the news right now and nothing else even comes close. Drudge isn’t afraid to be an opinionated editor and his site design perfectly emphasizes that. It’s bold, it’s risky, and it’s pure Drudge design.

It’s good cluttered

The Drudge Report usually leads with a “font size=+7” ALL CAPS headline in Arial. Sometimes it’s italicized. Sometimes, for something big big, he’ll cap it off with the infamous siren .

After that you have three columns. Some headlines are sentence case, some are ALL CAPS . Some have photos, some are just a plain text headline. Sometimes more controversial or sensational headlines are colored red. There’s usually a big ad at the top and a few other ads sprinkled among the columns.

Stories aren’t grouped or organized except probably more interesting ones up top. And that’s it. Your eye darts all over the place looking around for something that looks interesting. The design encourages wandering and random discovery.

The site feels like a chaotic newsroom with the cutting room floor exposed. I think that’s part of the excitement — and good design.

Breaking news is breaking news

Have you seen “breaking news” on MSNBC or CNN lately? Almost anything can pass for breaking news now. “So and so speaks to the press about this or that” is now breaking news. Breaking news used to mean something seriously big and important or spectacular just happened. But the major news sites have watered it way down. When I hit MSNBC or CNN , and they have a “breaking news” bar (red/yellow usually), it’s easy to ignore because they’ve cried wolf one too many times. But when you see a big honking red ALL CAPS headline with the flashing siren on Drudge, you know it’s newsworthy.

One guy can run it

The site is run by Matt Drudge full time with help from an occasional part-time contributor. If the site was 5 pages or 10 pages or 30 pages, he’d likely need additional people and technology to manage it all.

No news is the news

The Drudge Report is a headline site. There’s no “content” on the site. Yet, that’s news. The headlines themselves can be news. Drudge breaks stories without writing stories. In fact, The Drudge Report may be one of the only sites on the web that can break a story with just a headline or a photo. That’s baked right into the design.

It sends people away to keep them coming back

There’s actually no content on the Drudge Report. Well, sometimes he will post an email or a memo on his site, but it’s 99% links out to other news sources. His site is designed to send you away to bring you back. The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more. This is one of the secrets to building traffic: The more you send people away the more they’ll come back.

It’s fast

When you visit The Drudge Report, you get the Drudge report. There are no interstitial ads. There’s no load time. There’s no buffering. There’s nothing but instant content. The Drudge Report is Google-fast and Craigslist fast — quite a feat for a site that does 3,000,000 uniques a month run by one guy. BTW : Those 3,000,000 uniques a month translate into hundreds of millions of visits a month (source: CNN ).

It’s cheap to maintain

The design of the Drudge Report doesn’t require a fancy CMS or, in fact, any CMS at all. It’s edited by hand. His overhead is probably a couple grand a month max. A few thousand bucks a year in overhead that generates a few million a year in revenue. That’s good design.

It’s one page

The Drudge Report is one page. Every visit and every visitor is focused on that one page with a headline and three columns. He knows exactly what people are going to see, he knows exactly how people are going to see it. There’s no mystery page here that hasn’t been redesigned or mystery page there that’s throwing an error. It’s one page to look at at one page to work on. It is what it is. It doesn’t try too hard to be something it’s not.

It makes him a great living

Based on published ad rates and traffic numbers, it’s estimated that Matt Drudge makes “over a million a year.” Not bad for a single black and white page on the internet.

So these are some of the reasons why I think The Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Swing away.

Patrick Algrim

Put plainly, ugly can be an art form. Ugly Dolls are ugly, but everyone loves them. There are ugly dogs, but everyone loves them. I see way too much duplicated material on the Web, and sometimes going completely radical is refreshing. Reminds of me of indexhibit Web sites. Good write up! Love the in depth view of design that most people don’t understand. Aesthetics are not everything.

Jeffrey Mills

Great writeup Jason. Can’t say I disagree with you at all. The site isn’t what some of us graphic artists would call pleasing to the eye, but it definitely accomplishes more than most other sites on the net. I visit Drudge at least 6-10 times a day and swear by it. Clean, simple, does the job for me.

Dan Levengood

Absolutely agree. It’s brilliant.

The Drudge Report has been on my main link toolbar for over 10 years now. Rarely is there a day I don’t visit.

Drudge also manages to get “breaking news” up on his site as fast, or faster than CNN, NYTimes, etc. even if it means just a headline with no links.

Paul Erickson

You nailed it, J.

Nailed. It.

Eric Fields

When we started out in 1993 we had a style = fart sign hanging in the studio (it is no more) – we very consciously avoided any stylistic traps. In the meantime I have learned that good (and if necessary even trendy) style (and wonderful form) play an important role in delivering content to the viewer. But I never thought that graphic design has to be timeless. With very few exceptions (say highway signage) I love the fact that design starts to look dated after a while.

— Sagmeister ( AIGA.org )

Brian Burridge

I agree with your assessment of his site. I check it daily (have since 97), and I often think, “wow this site is so plain and boring”, but, that’s also why it’s so effective. It makes for a great case study on style vs function. I always prefer both, but sometimes style really can get in the way. In this case, Drudge is extremely functional, and I have a feeling that very few other styles could result in the same usefulness and uniqueness he has now.

I’ve spent years teasing my mother about her daily reading of the Drudge Report. I argued there are better options for news websites. I trivialized the news from Drudge based on the site design. How can a legitimate news source use such a simple layout?

Your article made me reconsider my suppositions. Maybe, my mother had it right all along. As a technical person, I look for the latest and greatest innovations in a websites. I overlooked the simplicity of Drudge’s design; while my mother appreciated it.

I thought your original tweet was a joke. Thank you for helping me rethink the simplicity and effectiveness of the Drudge Report.

If the Drudge Report’s ephemeral duration becomes the litmus test of ‘timeless’, we’re all properly and utterly screwed.

Attention span, people.

Are we confusing “utility” with “style” with “well designed”?

The Drudge site definitely has utility.

Well designed? Perhaps.

Has style? I vote no.

Anonymous Coward

I think it absolutely has style. I would say style is something that’s unique. People who are said to have style usually don’t dress or act like everyone else. They stand out. Drudge stands out. Drudge is like someone who can pull off an outfit that no one else can. It looks good on them, but on everyone else it looks stupid. That’s style, that’s Drudge.

I think what Matt has demonstrated more than anything with the Drudge Report is restraint. JF talks often about saying, “no”, well I think Drudge has clearly said “no” many times.

If you think back, lots of websites looked something like this 10 years ago. Probably even CNN. The difference is that the major news sites all got bigger, better, more sophisticated, more complicated, more ad-driven, partnership-ized, busy, crazy. I mean, CNN has headlines from The Onion on their home page now. What?!?

What Drudge has done is nothing. He found something that worked and stuck with it even when the rest of the web was “passing him by”. He resisted the urge to make his website into something it isn’t and something that isn’t him. Drudge, more than anything, still represents a genuine single voice. Why does he have to be anything more than that?

I have to applaud the guy. I can only imagine the crazy, and probably lucrative, offers he’s turned down.

Trevor Turk

I think it’s incredibly ugly, but you can’t argue with its effectiveness. No other site on the web has my eyes darting around like it does. There’s just something about it that makes you want to scan the whole page. It’s that “newsroom floor” feeling you’re talking about. There’s almost an energy about it.

It could be better if they (he) don’t use underline on links or brighter. Hard to read and see the separations. But i like simplicity :)

Perhaps the Drudge site does have style. Style in the same way “PC guy” has style as compared to the style of “Mac guy”.

Perhaps the question is style vs. taste?

Justin Reese

Only a designer (or a design aficionado) already knows that aesthetics are only a subset of design, so it’s not unexpected that laypeople (or bad designers) would be confused by your comment.

I have a very good friend who I love dearly, but who drives me absolutely batty at times because he is an aesthetic, and doesn’t much care about the cerebral aspects of design. I argue against hiding vital information behind rollovers, he argues that it “looks better” and “people will end up moving their mouse over it anyway”. I argue for clean and versatile layouts, he argues for grungy and organic layouts. (Can you tell which of us makes the PSDs and which makes the websites?)

Our relationship mirrors, to me, the dual aspects of design itself: the utility and the pretty. Some people (like me) find unvarnished utility to be pretty, and some people will accept unintuitive so long as it brings the looks. Nirvana is when the two can meet.

You can tell you’re there when both sides love it, laypeople find it curiously attractive, and John C. Dvorak says it’ll never work.

justin heideman

The Drudge Report survives and has staying power because Matt Drudge is a demagogue and digs up filth that people want to read. So I suppose from a certain perspective, it does serve the utility of being the right-wing national enquirer of the web. But as Kevin pointed out, that is certainly not good design.

If you want to look at a utilitarian, and almost well-designed site, the old cryptome.org site is pretty good.

I posit that a well designed version of drudge would do even better. Still wouldn’t improve the content, though.

I like how you evaluate the design not solely on aesthetics and trends but on things that last:

business goals profitability speed maintainability cost/overhead etc

I love how 37signals looks at the world.

I think what you said boils down to this: the Drudge Report is the only news website that has managed to approximate the feel of a newspaper in the web medium. It doesn’t imitate a newspaper, but it surfaces the single feature that has proven elusive to replicate online: the ability to scan with your eyes and pick out what’s really important or interesting. No other news website has managed a design that comes close to achieving this.

Drudge Page view statistics 500 million page views monthly 1.95 billion ad impressions monthly 12 million unique visitors monthly 1.75 million daily unique visitors (weekday) 1 million daily unique visitors (weekend day)

but seriously…yuck. useit.com reeks of style in comparison.

i think he might find that being touted as a “design god” as rather humorous.

he laughs all the way to the bank.

Count me in with the group that thought it was a joke. I have visited Drudge Report several times, and just cannot manage to spend even five minutes on that site.

To me it looks disorganized, cluttered, and amateur. Since I personally feel that Drudge is one of the most horrible and disingenuous people in that arena, I nearly always go there following a link from a blog that mentions something on his site, and the vast majority of the time once I’ve arrived I have a very difficult time finding whatever it was that was mentioned on the referring site. Most times I give up completely.

I respect your opinion, and you surely know what you are talking about most of the time, but this is one instance where I shall completely disagree with you.

And… Design, aside, the content of that site is usually just horrendous.

“But when you see a big honking red ALL CAPS headline with the flashing siren on Drudge, you know it’s newsworthy.”

No… That’s not been my experience at all. The flashing siren means nothing more than the fact that Drudge wants to call attention to it. I have yet to see it be something newsworthy that was not also completely biased.

It’s a shame that the quality of “news” on the Drudge Report doesn’t come anywhere close to the perceived quality of layout.

Drudge is about the worst source of information I can think of. But I guess we can all agree it’s a quick, efficient way to get it.

The real brilliance of the Drudge Report, if it can be said there is any, is that there’s so much awful, worthless nonsense strewn throughout it that it forces the reader to look at most of it just to find anything worth actually reading.

Which is why I stopped visiting it years ago.

If 37signals was to customer support what Drudge is to journalistic integrity, you’d be out of business.

Reading Jason’s points I tend to agree with him – looks aside, certain elements of the site are examples of smart design – but I suppose my actual indifference towards the Drudge Report speaks the loudest. I’ve seen the site several times, but it’s never hooked me.

I think it’s that the design of the site, and the fact I know that it’s just one guy’s collection of headlines, fails to signal credibility. It feels like kind of a cardboard cutout of a news site, or a “who cares what this guy wants me to see.”

Don Schenck

As much as I’d like to agree with you, Jason, there’s just no way I’ll ever say anything even remotely nice about Drudge or his site.

This isn’t a post about opinions on journalistic integrity or Matt Drudge’s political leanings. Let’s keep the politics out of this. Let’s keep the comments on topic — design, effectiveness, communication, etc. Thank you.

Jason, this type of head above the parapet analysis is why I love visiting SvN so much. You get the feeling that popular but “ugly” sites (Ebay, Craigslist, Myspace pages etc) were started with no clue about aesthetics but to simply to deliver something the creator wanted to deliver RIGHT AWAY. I’m guessing Matt Drudge has never been a web designer and his site works because what he does is more important to him than how he does it.

I don’t find Drudge’s site anything other than a relic. I was pretty surprised it was still around. In a time that predated Reddit, Digg, Fark, & their clones it was more innovative.

Quite honestly, I think if the last 5 years have shown anything it is that people prefer a variety of contributors. Look at the top blogs, websites, etc. So it may not have changed and may still do what Matt wants splendidly. It does not, however, reflect the utility that other news aggregation sites provide.

Interesting look at a site from a design standpoint that probably wouldn’t ever get that treatment though!

I have thought the same things many times. It is interesting how such an “ugly” site can really be considered good design. It serves it’s purpose and serves it well.

Wanting to keep ‘politics’ out of the design discussion is admirable (although the comment seemed a bit rude). However, the original post implied that it was the design that has allowed the Drudge site to endure. By making that claim – it would seem only reasonable to expect people to challenge that. I happen to agree with the challenge – I have serious doubts that the website design has anything to do with the persistant popularity of the Drudge website…

People blathering on about integrity are totally missing the point. Drudge posts headlines that will grab your attention. It’s up to YOU to decide whether the content has “integrity,” and that’s easy enough to do based on the reputation of the site that is linked to. And most of the links tend to be AP stories, which are supposedly neutral, right?

Yes, limits! I used to read Drudge, and I didn’t like how news would disappear when he replaced a headline with another headline. What kind of site had no archives? But I realized that was part of his secret – stay light and fast, and keep the readers constantly visiting so they don’t miss anything.

(I don’t read Drudge anymore, but that’s I only read the Lex column these days.)

Maybe because the Drudge Report’s layout is so ugly, it also stays unique because nobody wants to copy it. If something works well and looks good, people are going to copy it. Just look at how many newspaper websites rip off the design of the New York Times, or how many project management webapps end up looking like Basecamp.

Ugliness serves as protective mechanism. “It works really well, but it’s so damn ugly! Let’s look for something else to copy.”

While I agree with many of the points made, let’s keep in mind that being successful because of your design and being successful despite your design are two different things.

Do you think it’s the ugly look that is the reason it’s so oft visited or that it made a name for itself by breaking some huge stories in the 90’s while most news sites barely even knew what the web was?

Drudge fails in one key area: It doesn’t evolve. He has no permalinks, no archive, and gets little search-traffic because of it.

Yes that keeps his maintenance costs down, but it also means that his traffic has been flatline for a long time, while other more “webby” sites like Huff Post soar.

Even the New Yorker seems positively progressive (design-wise) compared to Drudge.

What if it wasn’t called the “Drudge” Report?

What if it were the “Smith” Report?

Again, I don’t pretend to know the secret to its success. But two things come to mind…the name, and the consistency.

The name suggests great news gossip, so I agree that the “politics” of the site it totally fair game. And when you have had a following for so long on a site that has always looked a certain way…no need to redesign the thing. In fact, that’s the last thing you should do.

However, there are a million other “news” sites out there that aren’t as popular as Drudge. If you were to come across Drudge or something similar today for the first time, I wonder if you would be seeing its praises.

I’m wondering if a site design like this can only grow organically from non-design or if any ‘titled’ graphic designers out there would have the guts to design ‘ugly’.

Sorry but I disagree Jason. I think you use of the words “design” is your mistake. You definitely list some valid points as to why works in some areas but aesthetically it’s appalling. The point of a site like this is to clearly display content in a clear and legibly manner. This site fails in both areas. The typography, hierarchy and layout of the site are amateurish at best and make it difficult to take in the content. There are many more reasons why this site isn’t even close to being the best “designed” site on the web. One simple fact is that the main content ends up being below the fold on my screens. There is a ton of real estate taken up at the top of the site for an ad and a misplaced article. I’m also not sure how “It’s cheap to maintain” it’s proof that it’s a well “designed” site. Again, I think your use of the word design is what’s throwing people off. I agree that design goes further than just aesthetics but you can’t claim it’s the best designed site and then leave out the aesthetic aspect of it.

Honestly, I’ve never understood the attraction of Drudge’s site. The layout has always repelled me. I find the whole Drudge Report experience unpleasant and easily ignored.

Stephen Fleming

Sooner or later, Drudge will buy an iPhone, then realize how badly his three-column layout breaks on the iPhone browser.

Simple design is good, but he needs to have an alternative display for smaller devices.

Yes, there is the companion site ‘idrudgereport’, but it doesn’t work well.

Chris J, the Huffington Post is not profitable, and the Drudge Report is profitable with high margins.

Hire a great visual designer redesign the thing, say maybe 3 other versions. Put the 4 designs in front of a group of Drudge users. Test the readability, click timing, eye tracking, ad clicks, page file size, time spent on site (or whatever factors you believe determine the effectiveness of the site). Compare your data across the 4 different designs.

THEN you can more closely determine if the current site is “well designed” or “best”—when you have something concrete to objectively compare it to. You MAY determine that it is horribly designed. Otherwise, you’re just spitting useless (except for conversation stirring) subjective statements here, JF.

Ryan Graves

You can’t argue with the facts. It may be ugly but people love it and Matt is getting rich.

I don’t think you can separate his politics from the design of the site. Its my opinion that the simplicity/ugliness of the design is supposed to convey an everyman appeal. It is supposed to make the reader feel superior, which is exactly what his readers (who tend to have a particular political view) want.

I think we should be clear on our terminology since “ugly” is such a loaded word. When I say that the Drudge Report is ugly, I mean that

a) it’s almost painful to look at, AND b) it’s full of lies, distortions and bullshit.

Let’s not leave that part out.

David Andersen

“Drudge is about the worst source of information I can think of.”

This is funny since all he does is link to every other online source of media; thus I’d have to agree.

Good posting.

What kind of site had no archives?

There are archives – apparently you haven’t look too hard.

“The Drudge Report survives and has staying power because Matt Drudge is a demagogue and digs up filth that people want to read. So I suppose from a certain perspective, it does serve the utility of being the right-wing national enquirer of the web. But as Kevin pointed out, that is certainly not good design.”

Then why, as a lefty Dem, do I constantly visit the site?

Drudge is to the web as the NY Post is to print – tasty and bite-sized.

And FWIW, design is synonymous with utility.

Philip Dhingra

Re: the iPhone comment

I usually prefer going to Drudge on an iPhone vs. HuffingtonPost because I know that drudge will reliably load faster and is less likely to crass mobile Safari.

I agree that Drudge has some positive design features working in its favor. But I also think any barebones design serving strong content can be effective.

It’s like Lots of:

Content(Partisan Bias) + Ugly Design + Minimal Advertisement / Barebones Presentation = Huge Traffic

And you can’t dismiss Drudge’s content when you’re talking about that site’s success—they feed people bias and people love that. FOX News Channel does the same thing with huge ratings and they do not hold the same design principles in any way. People want to read supporting “evidence” of the opinion they already have.

If you think I’m just spouting liberal excuses, there’s a liberal site called Rawstory.com that has tried to emulate Drudge. And, afaik, they have not been nearly as successful. For them, I think the equation is more like:

Lots of Content(Partisan Bias) + Ugly Design + Too Many Ads / Crap User Experience = Moderate Traffic

JF – my apologies for veering off topic, but really! It appears that the commenters who are ranting about the politics, distortion, lies, etc. of the DR rarely read it, have bought in to whatever their peers are saying about it and have closed their minds.

Go look at it now with an open mind. It’s no more distorted, politically biased, or full of lies than any other media site. Stop making assumptions based on your tribe and think.

Engineers might consider his site well-designed. I still remember his right-wing demagogic rants of the past and avoid his site religiously.

Working well and being aesthetically appealing is better than working well and looking ugly. It’s an indication of a lack of effort to get both aspects correct. Lazy.

Brooks Jordan

Great post because I don’t want to like it or believe it’s successful design, but all of your points convince.

That he’s pulling a mil down per year is definitely a good indicator that the approach is effective.

It seems that the discussion is focusing on debating whether or not consistency, functionality, and efficiency are characteristics of good “design.” My notion of “design,” though, has two components: functionality and aesthetics. Drudge is functional but not, in my opinion aesthetically pleasing. In my mind, therefore, it has only one of the components of “design.” To that extent, I don’t think it’s good “design,” despite being functional.

What I don’t get is, why does anyone think that The Drudge Report has been “designed” at all. Sadly, the idea of “design” has been cheapened and misused by a bunch of overly righteous computer geeks (such as Jason here). I’m sorry I read this blog post, and I’m even more sorry that I’m wasting more time commenting on it. But the fact is, The Drudge Report is messy, poorly laid out, hard to read, and ugly. There’s not need to try and re-define the idea of design (as Jason does) just for the sake of sounding like you are so thoughtful and forward thinking.

Drudge is essentially a feed-reader with some annoying ads, a few pics, and one main story (tabloid style). Big f’in deal.

“Working well and being aesthetically appealing is better than working well and looking ugly.”

Is it? Why, if it’s working well? Is it going to work better than well? Are you arguing that the site would be even better, draw more traffic?

Jason, you’re the one who described Drudge as a more honest arbiter of breaking news >

Have you seen “breaking news” on MSNBC or CNN lately? Almost anything can pass for breaking news now. “So and so speaks to the press about this or that” is now breaking news. Breaking news used to mean something seriously big and important or spectacular just happened. But the major news sites have watered it way down. When I hit MSNBC or CNN, and they have a “breaking news” bar (red/yellow usually), it’s easy to ignore because they’ve cried wolf one too many times. But when you see a big honking red ALL CAPS headline with the flashing siren on Drudge, you know it’s newsworthy.

Let’s compare. As of right now, here’s Drudge’s breaking news headline: “TRASH TALK: AL-QAIDA INSULTS OBAMA IN NEW MESSAGE”

And here’s MSBNC’s: “BREAKING NEWS: NBC reports, citing Democratic sources, that Obama offers HHS job to Daschle”

Hell, even Fox News is running with this as their breaking news: “FOX News Confirms Daschle Offered Health and Human Services Secretary”

You really want to make the case that the Drudge one is important and truly newsworthy just because it’s big all caps text on Drudge, but MSNBC’s isn’t? MSNBC and CNN have cried wolf too many times, but Drudge is just the consumate straight shooter? Are you kidding me?

That’s not a discussion of design, that’s a discussion of the site’s editorial merit, and when you discuss the editorial merit of the Drudge Report, you are unavoidable discussing politics as the Drudge Report is an unabashedly partisan source of information.

I apologize for being off topic, but you passed judgement on the worth of certain sources in your original post, so comments discussing those positions should be as expected as comments discussings the merits of the design/layout.

If you don’t want a conversation to veer towards politics, then don’t pick a hyper-partisan example to demonstrate your point, and don’t make comments about one news source being more accurate than others, and then expect people to ignore your comments.

Will, there’s nothing in your quote (from Jason) about accuracy.

I’ll preface this by saying that I am a schooled and experienced graphic and web designer. Now whether I agree or disagree with Drudge’s content is irrelevant to me. Because the only thing I find offensive here is The Drudge Report being described as “well designed” not to mention calling it “one of the best designed sites on the web”.

No one can argue that the fact that The Drudge Report can be easily maintained by one person, is cheap to maintain and that it provides Matt Drudge with a great living are all admirable qualities for a website, they’re completely irrelevant to a discussion about the level of quality of the sites design.

The premise of this discussion is equally as ridiculous if I was to say “The Ford Focus is the most tasty piece of fruit someone can buy. Now let me clarify my definition of tasty fruit. My definition of fruit goes beyond tastiness and into areas of fuel mileage, acceleration, passenger room, trunk space and cost of ownership. However, I still think that the Ford Focus is a tasty piece of fruit even though I consider it to be a car. Can a car also be a tasty piece of fruit? I think the Ford Focus proves that it can.”

On the web, the line between design and development are often blurred. So I could understand someone discussing load time, text size and amount of content all in the same discussion about “quality of design”.

So if you want to talk about The Drudge Report as a well developed site, or a functional success, go right ahead, and I’ll back that up. But “design” is an aesthetic term, so please leave it out of a discussion about the Drudge Report unless it’s in the context of “the Drudge report has a reprehensibly poor design.” That doesn’t mean the site is anything short of an undeniable success. It just means it’s poorly designed and yes, ugly.

Ben Clemens

I can’t agree. I don’t mind primitive, utilitarian design choices; design is not style-dependent. However, beyond pointing that out, your arguments boil down simply to ‘people like and use it, therefore it’s good design.’ This is akin to making design choices by what is familiar (‘intuitive’ is a synonym that sounds better but is the same thing), and has led to less influence for design in interactive media (engineers have actually done most of the design innovation). Design exists because of the belief that things can be made better. If that isn’t true, we don’t really need designers, just craftspeople. Apologies for being blunt, but I think you’re just being provocative, not really insightful. That’s valuable, but not necessarily accurate.

I don’t read Drudge, but agree the format is very usable. In the tech news theregister.co.uk comes the closest, albiet a little more stylized. I often read the breaking tech news there wondering why there are no real tech news sites in the US?

One of the worst sites that offer style over substance in my opinion is espn. Stuff going everywhere, and but real content is very difficult to find… very annoying.

But it’s so hideous to look at??? I suppose a software engineer can love an ugly duck based on function alone. My eyes won’t let my brain make that leap.

Let’s not forget who Drudge sees as his audience: the news media. For that crew, the design choices Drudge has made are perfect. Style is a marker of culture. The style of Drudge, with its ugly wire service feel, is “old time journalism”.

That signifies all sorts of bad old things: we know what stories are important (look at that headline!), we get down and dirty in the muck to get those stories, we are the only ones with the skills to cut through the flood of information, we have the courage to speak the truth even when it isn’t pretty, etc. These are the things journalists would like to believe about themselves.

Also, with the links out to their stuff, Drudge feeds this sense of self.

Style? The site has it in spades. But most of us aren’t the audience.

Mister Snitch

I completely agree with this post. Also, just about everything here could be equally applied to Instapundit.

I more or less agree but I wish he would fix his title tag it reads DRUDGE REPORT 2009

@Nate Tharp

“But “design” is an aesthetic term…”

No, it’s not.

Can you not design a screw? A chemical compound? A theory? A process? What do aesthetics have to do with any of these? A design is a willful construction of something. Aesthetics may or may not be part of that.

AC – maybe accuracy wasn’t the right word. Veracity, seriousness, gravity…?

Jason’s point seemed to be that “breaking news” on the big media sites is trivial, while on Drudge it isn’t. I would disagree.

Then again, the example I pointed out for Drudge (the alQaeda thing) isn’t actually “breaking news” – red with the light and all that jazz. So maybe the point about “breaking news” is that the “mainstream” sites treat any recent, developing story as breaking news whereas Drudge only gives it the big red treatment if it’s actually earth-shaking. But if it’s earth shaking, the other sites usually make it seem such too.

I don’t disagree with the point Jason is making about the effectiveness of the Drudge report as a straightforward collection of links that are free of the distractions that a full-fledged news website generally entails. I just interpreted some of Jason’s comments as making the case that Drudge was a BETTER source of news because of this, which I think is terribly subjective and in many cases demonstrably false.

Nobody beats Drudge in the salacious headline department. Sure it’s popular and profitable, but it is so because it’s sensational, not because it’s the best news source out there. I don’t think it’s hugely popular and profitable because of it’s simplicity. I think it’s editorial voice and choices appeal to a lot of people.

I would argue that the Drudge Report would be equally successful in any format because it fills a niche.

Couldn’t agree more – everyone else in the news world is trying to figure out how to build an online brand, and this guys been successfully maintaining one for 10 plus years. Really impressive.

Andy Gadiel

I recently relaunched my Phish fan site (about the band, not the banking schemes) at http://gadiel.com/phish

I’ve always kept it plain white, basic with links. Get people the information they want as quickly as possible and get out of the way.

I retired it when the band retired, and relaunched it right before they just came back. People have been emailing me asking me not to change the design. I have no plans for an alteration.

Simple wins, every time.

Gerrit van Aaken

... and it doesn’t even validate, OMG!

I think the site is profitable because its clearly Drudge’s creation. No “real” news site could use this layout because it is clearly designed by someone who’s not a professional journalist or designer. If CNN’s site looks like a 3rd grader did it, then I will immediately distrust it. If an individual’s site looks the site, I might give them some leeway.

If Drudge’s site looked slick and polished, then his readers might get the sense that he’s part of the “establishment” and would feel like they were viewing something that came from a committee instead of Drudge himself.

Yes, the site IS well designed, as much as it pains me to say it, because the design of the site reinforces the message that the author is trying to convey. Which is: “hey I’m not a big-time news conglomerate and if you agree with my politics then you can trust me.”

That’s the ultimate (and only) goal of design anyway.

Let’s compare. As of right now, here’s Drudge’s breaking news headline

That’s not a BREAKING NEWS headline on Drudge, it’s just a headline. A BREAKING NEWS headline on drudge is used very sparingly. It has a siren, it’s often italic, and it’s red.

Isn’t ‘good’ design dependent on the relationship between intent (what the intended result/effect is) and outcome (what really happens)?

Jason, I understand that your definition of design covers graphic aesthetic as well as architecture, efficiency (for both the site maintainer and the user), etc.

But I contend that Drudge’s popularity and staying power has little to do with its design and even less to do with its graphic aesthetic. Yes, there’s a bit of the “this is a crazy site full of crazy stuff” to the look, which is appropriate for the content. But it’s an overstatement to say this was a deliberative process.

If the site had cookie-cutter graphics, if it was easier to read, it would be just as popular and not any harder to maintain and probably not much longer to load.

As for the “application design” of getting users to return, sure, there’s as much there as there is in any overly sensational media outlet. And if the site had the same design, but lost the over-the-top gossip and sensationalism, it would fail.

I frequently go out with old shirts with holes in them. Some might say this is my “look,” that it’s an anti-style. It’s not. I give no thought to it, just like Drudge. I do not attribute the fact that I’ve always done this to the “staying power of my vision.” There is no vision.

Drudge is not a noble savage.

@Joe: Hey, we software engineers have both hemispheres of the brain too. At least the ones I would want to work with do.

You’re right, though, about the Drudge Report’s looks. You don’t connote as much credibility when your site is disorganized and looks like an MS Paint mockup.

Correlation = Not Causation

Drudge is successful because 1) he has a loyal and niche audience 2) he had first mover advantage to grab them (his site originally started as a mailing list) and 3) he keeps at it as passionately today as he did when he first started. Note that none of these things has anything to do whatsoever with its design. All other points listed in the post are moot and border on post hoc fallacy. A liberal could write a post on why Huffington Post owes its success to its use of comments. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are super-rich because they both wear glasses. You get my point. Correlation is not causation.

Yeah, it’s the site design that gets people there. Just like how O’Reilly gets high ratings because of his well designed set.

out of here

You can’t say that the site isn’t well-designed, simply because it commands a large audience among its angry, scared and mentally lazy target demographic.

Rush Limbaugh has a big audience, etc.; but no one - including, I imagine, rush himself - would ever say he wears well-designed suits, or that he speaks thoughtfully and carefully. He’s sensationalist, and appeals to a certain group of people, partially because he helps them justify their fears and insecurities. (It’s the same impulse that nationalist right-wing demagogues often prey upon, IMO.)

whoops, I meant, you can’t say that the site IS well-designed simply because it commands a large audience….

How can you someone call Drudge’s 810,000,000+ /month audience “niche”?

Drudge is successful because of the content he provides easy access to. People have come to trust/appreciate his judgement. Most people would rather spend 5 minutes a day on his site getting the stories that matter, than spend spend 20x that time on the other news sites/the net looking for the worthwhile stories of the day.

Those who don’t understand the beauty in his design (and by design, I mean the page aesthetic, the way it is constructed, the way it is maintained, etc.) will take their shots at him. And he’ll just keep on laughing all the way to the bank.

The Drudge Report has to value the banner ads which like all other images on the page. I bet they get great click through rates (black hat?)!

I think the Drudge Reports success is only attributable to loyal readership/community and free old media press (i.e. Fox News).

At one of the Ruby Conf BoF’s I heard someone claim that Craigslist is has an ingenious (chaotic) UI…I laughed. Whoever said this had a point though and their assertion is based on the same design philosophy.

I’m sure Craig would be disappointed to be compared to the Drudge…Sorry!

As a few others have already mentioned, the design of DrudgeReport.com reinforces its overall message: “These are the stories the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you.”

It feels more like a rumor site than a news site, and I think that is part of its appeal. (Not to me, but to others.) But since the readers are redirected to news stories written by other, more mainstream media outlets, everything is still seen as trustworthy by his readers. (Readers wouldn’t feel that way if he were writing a blog, for example.)

I haven’t thought about it before reading Jason’s thoughts, but I agree that the Drudge Report does have an effective design. Beautiful? Not at all. Could it still be improved? Almost certainly. But not the way most graphic designers think when they first see it.

isn’t it possible that a site like this turns out to be effective largely by accident, as far as the presentation/implementation is concerned? clearly, the content is what drives his traffic and brings success. to me ‘design’ implies intent. so how can it be good design if the design is not intentional? the design may stay out of the way of the site being effective, but does that make it good? i think that’s a good starting point for any design, and many fall short of that simple accomplishment. but it’s a pretty modest accomplishment, design-wise. i hope we’re all aiming higher.

The Drudge Report takes a very straightforward idea (linking to news items) and presents it in a complicated and difficult to follow way. That’s not good design, it’s a mess.

“I frequently go out with old shirts with holes in them. Some might say this is my “look,” that it’s an anti-style. It’s not. I give no thought to it, just like Drudge.”

If you give no thought to it, why are you recalling it and using it to make a point? The fact that you are aware of it means it’s a conscious choice. Ditto for Drudge. His continued choice to leave the site as it always has been is a design decision.

I would love to see some Drudge Report makeovers using other news website layouts as the template.

Also, David Anderson, I loved your response here!

“As a few others have already mentioned, the design of DrudgeReport.com reinforces its overall message: “These are the stories the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you.”

I don’t see how this is its message. Right now, of the first 18 links on the site, they are almost all mainstream media. 3 AP stories, 3 AFP stories, 2 Reuters stories, and 1 each from NY Times, ABC, BBC, The Sun, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (UK), The Observer, NY Post, and the Jerusalem Post.

This whole right-wing, non-mainstream media meme is ridiculous. Where’s the critical thinking?

I think he gets it from his Dad:

refdesk.com

Though the story goes that it was Matt who encouraged his Dad to get online many years ago.

Great post jason! Thx for taking the time to talk about it.

Sebhelyesfarku

This is pure bullshit. It’s popular despite it looks like crap because the content and habitual reasons. Bad typography is necessary for usability? Give me a break.

I think the bold simplicity of the headlines and lead stories is a design decision is worth noting, as is the judgement to eschew new features and expanding the site beyond the core offering, which may have been tempting.

If you think about it though, the simplicity of the site architecture was (likely) not a design decision per se - he didn’t choose between hand coding his site and a Vignette install back in 1997 - he just did what he could afford and knew, and stuck with it as it has worked for him.

The things that set the Drudge Report apart are mostly editorial and management decisions, not design decisions. I agree that the design has some (clunky) merits, but I think you’re taking the whole “design is how it works” mentality and conflating management with design.

Most relevant, as far as the staying power of the site goes, is the fact that he got in very early in the game in the intersection between online and mainstream media, and had a blockbuster product (Lewinsky) at just the right time. That means a lot. You can’t tell someone who wants to be an electric guitarist “What you want to do is plan to break out around 1966 or so, and work from there.”

He’s since done a good job of Not Growing, Not Changing, and Personally Getting Rich. I don’t know if that sets such a compelling example for people looking to grow or establish companies and products. But the editorial ballsiness is a great example for other media sites.

Demetrius Ford

I finally went to the Drudge Report after hearing so much about it. I was flabbergasted:(....my personal thoughts about the design and some of its content are utter rubbish! How this man makes 1 million dollars a year is probably the same reason why some people actually think Sarah Palin is intelligent.

This is like saying McDonald’s has the best food because they sell the most of it.

Successful != good, and other people have correctly pointed out the alternate causes above.

If fugly is your thing, then it’s great to be sure.

timeless: and that’s why i digg popurls.com

I agree with everything except the font; it’s really hard on my eyes, and I don’t have a particularly bad vision. Then again, it’s so easy to supply your own style and the page still works fine, so that in itself is a good thing.

@David Anderson

I’ll rephrase, “design”, as Jason used it, is an aesthetic term. Yes, it is.

A design (noun) is in fact a “willful construction of something”. But when used as a verb, with an object, like Jason did it is an aesthetically-related term. Please find me a definition that conflicts with that. And if you want to tell me that I’m making assumptions about Jason’s intent and usage, read the first sentence of his second paragraph.

“To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities..”

So the base/core/beginning of his evaluation is quality of design, as it relates to aesthetics.

/\ That’s my comment above.

I’m not the anonymous coward I was portrayed to be. Just a commenter who forgot to enter their name.

Nate – I’m not following. He clearly says, in your own quote, that “design goes beyond aesthetic qualities…” To say, then, that he is only using it as an aesthetic term is a direct contradiction of his words.

I don’t know about “aesthetic masterpiece”, but I agree it’s good design. Functional design. We often tie the word design too closely with how things look or how they make us feel when we see them. But I like your broader definition of design. It’s much more accurate.

“This is like saying McDonald’s has the best food because they sell the most of it.”

This is a false analogy. “Best” is subjective and contextual. There is no absolute ‘best’ for all people at all times. Designers, who argue all the time about what is ‘best’, should be more aware of that than most.

you should check out Bourque.com as well, it’s focused on Canadian news, but arranged in a similarly sensible way.

James Hudnall

Less is more is always the best approach. Drudge gives you essential links to other news sites. It cuts through the BS to give you the bottom line on stories that he finds interesting. His tastes may not always be yours, but he seems to have a good eye, because people keep coming back to read what he thinks is hot.

Personally, I think he sets a great example to all us web people, because one man takes on the powerful in his own way and makes them sit up and take notice. How many of us can do that? Raise your hands.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, I think he’s a web pioneer.

you can sell any shit here but people just buy it

I like the minimal approach this website takes. I give it 10/10 for content, 10/10 for ease of use, but 5/10 for aesthetics. I definitely think it can be aesthetically better.

I noticed you’re not following. I clearly said that his quote states that “design” is the base/core/beginning/start/origin (I don’t know how else to say this more clearly) of his evaluation criteria. I don’t believe that I said that it was his ONLY criteria.

Therefore “design” and “aesthetics” are intrinsically linked, by Jason’s own admission, in the way design is being used in this discussion.

So have you found a definition of “design” as it pertains to designing a website that doesn’t relate the word to aesthetics?

It’s just a fast food menu. What if the whole web looked like that?

There are two keys to Drudge’s success. The first, as you accurately point out, is its speed and utility. It doesn’t change. It’s easy to navigate. It’s fast to load. These are all great things.

However, you can’t ignore that it also selectively chooses what it highlights, often totally misrepresenting the content of the articles it links to and even printing headlines a few days apart that contradict each other. Opinions get the same treatment-a headline and a link-as a thoroughly documented and fact-checked article, giving the impression to readers that they are of the same value.

In short, it was his political agenda-including the arrogance of never acknowledging or apologizing for the presentation of errors or outright lies-combined with an easy-to-use and fast design, that brought success.

If one has no ethics, it is possible to make money off of fools. Combine a lack of journalistic ethics with a lack of design skills and you can make a lot of money. Spammers do a great job and if they didn’t make money would be out of existence, too.

you should re-title this post to something along the lines “pretentious designers fawn over crap!” drudge is a parasite.

One of the worst designed sites on the web. www.phatclub.co.nz

emma – so true.

Cant really find anything good or exciting about the drudge report. 100% fluid layouts should be banned as they’re never used properly, ridiculous amount of white space at the top of the page (on a 1024 screen, only 1 link can be seen), no consistency in the line height… plainly it just farked.

Problem is, its like a car wreck. People cant look away…

Felipe Fermin

Okay everyone, here’s the deal:

Let’s redesign the Drudge Report! But let’s keep it’s same layout in order for it to be just as fast when loading.

I am talking about making the website just a little bit more pleasing to the eye while maintaining the ‘ingredients’ that have it made it so succesful.

CSS to the minimum. Just little changes in font, background, animated GIFs (ugh! ugly ulgy siren), etc. Anything that would make it more easy on the eye when reading it headlines.

What do you think? What are your recommendations?

I don’t think simplicity has to come at the sacrifice of readability or sanity. Good design seems like it’s the ability to deliver the right functionality through the right visual presentation. While the Drudge Report may be some things, I’d never call it good design…

Honestly this seems like it’s the same claim Adobe tries to make with it’s “Ps”/”Ai”/”Id” icons. Since when is being lazy held with such high regard?

I prefer to think of good design as things like the iPod wheel, or the way the new MacBook latch works, or how iTunes doesn’t have a “Now Playing” list (remember how all the original MP3 apps did it?) or a delete/remove button in the window.

Also how Safari replaces the refresh button with the stop button, and has no Go button or browser throbber. Now these are examples of good simplicity. Not underlined and poorly shadowed all-uppercase italic typography…......

His continued choice to leave the site as it always has been is a design decision.

OK, you’re right. (A commenter admitting he’s wrong?!?)

I don’t doubt that he’s had critics/supporters asking him to change/alter/update the design over the years, and it’s clear he’s refused because he likes it the way it is.

I still contend that there are far more obvious reasons for the success of the site than the design choice to keep it “the way it is”—and, in fact, the design choices he’s made (or not made) are just as likely to have hindered the site’s success as to have contributed to it.

I don’t buy your argument.

Drudge’s site is just butt ugly. It could be simple yet attractive without much work.

But even if it were “beautiful” to look at it wouldn’t matter much either.

It’s still from Matt Drudge.

‘nuff said.

david Putney

I always took a different lesson away from drudgereport—people come to his site because of the content. If your content is good, then it doesn’t matter what you look like.

Google News. That’s brilliant design.

Drudge report – I stayed 10 seconds the first time I heard of it 5 years ago and never went back, entirely based on how hard it is to read and evaluate the sources.

Yes, you cannot correlate Drudge’s success with the un-designed nature of his site. Not entirely, anyway. It is, to a great degree, dependent on the content and the way he spins it.

A similar liberal site would be BuzzFlash.com, by the way, which is just marginally better designed. And Duncan Black’s Eschaton has had the same terrible template for ages (Blogger 1.0 site, still using Haloscan for comments!)...so the answer is really that content and editorial direction still matter. ThinkProgress has great amounts of both AND good design, so the two are not mutually exclusive.

As a former print news designer turned web guy, Drudge’s failure, to me, is less one of design in an aesthetic sense, but one of information architecture. As noted above, opinion and news are freely blended (intentionally?) on his site and not labelled as such. This may sucker the rubes, but not more sophisticated readers.

Check out this pretty good feed of Drudge that actually includes images, related links, headline styling, etc.

http://drudgereportfeed.com

techmeme>drudge

I couldn’t agree more. Drudge is by far the best news site in terms of both content and design.

Ugly Sites Rock!. There are hundreds of examples like craigslist.org, officialhomepage.org etc

Looking at Drudge, it is important that one guy can run it - as in, it’s simple enough for one guy to run - but I think it’s equally important that one guy DOES run it. There’s a clear vision coming from a single person, and the lack of internal discord is evident. Many designed-by-committee, run-by-committee sites end up with a kind of kitchen-sink approach to design and layout.

warren Colbert

I’m going to have to disagree. I think the site is hideous.

It might not be full of eye candy and crazy cool looking stuff like other sites, but drudgereport makes it’s money from the sheer simplicity of the site layout which is why I always go there and will continue to do so.

I just wish he would time stamp his stories so that I could more easily scan the page for newly posted items. Drudgereport.com is my favorite website, though.

As Drudge would say, “adabadabada and all the rest…...”

I do not like the looks of the site, But I can always find something interesting and right now it is the only place on the web to find unbiased truth. I have long given up on the lies of the mainstream media and had given up on news alltogether untill I found Drudge. For me it is the fact that I can find the stuff the liberal controled media does not want me to see that makes me come back not the style.

Drudge Report looks like a GeoCities personal web page circa 1996. The subjects he has been choosing to post of late seem to stay there until their impact stales, when those stories aren’t already days old already. He’s been late to the game on most stories over the summer, versus blogs. And hey let’s not forget Ashley’B-Face’ Todd and how eager Drudge was to go to bat for this lying loony and her “Obama-inspired ‘attack’ ”.

Brian in WV

If a site is poorly designed but is useful and usable (like Drudge Report), it isn’t poorly designed.

András Puiz

Drudge Report is one of the worst-designed sites on the web. It’s iconic since it has achieved some unique type of notoriety, but that’s about it.

Your argument boils down to “It’s popular, so it’s gotta be good.”

Wrong. It’s god-awful. As I’m foreign, I was introduced to this site way too late. When I first opened it, my reaction was, “WTF is this horrible, confused mess?!” My second reaction was similar. So was the third. And the fourth. And the fifth. And the three hundredth.

The design of that site just plain sucks. There are the headlines, alright, I get that part. Then there are sections, links, in a seemingly random layout, without a word of explanation on what the hell they are.

The site is a usability nightmare. It’s not clear what the hell is going on where.

If you’re just there to click on the headlines (like I guess most readers are), then you don’t mind the bad design, you just click away. But the design is still bad.

That is, unless you define design as “the various ways in which the Drudge Report is a cool site.” I think saying that the Drudge Report is a well-designed site is an act of intellectual corruption in the pursuit of coming up with a catchy headline. I disapprove.

Oh look it’s an article whoring for hits.

Stop, you’re killing me! No, really: stop.

Drudge’s site is barely designed at all. And what design there is is bare-bones utilitarian and un-great. He got famous for content: that’s it. The format could be called “I learned just enough html to scrape by”; it’s primitive. If his success depended on the design, he would have perished when web features like that spinning siren disappeared from the rest of the web, circa 1997.

No, he’s made good despite the lack of design, by having good content. He made a name by daring to focus on the stories that left-leaning MSM editors spiked and declared “non-news”. It’s the content that people went wild for and still do, because somehow, the MSM dinosaurs (like Detroit car makers) are unable to respond to the appetite of consumers; they don’t get it, and Drudge patently does.

Margaret Ozment

I agree that the Drudge site is not a pretty site but it provides the information you need. I have found another site that I am beginning to likely equally as much. It is raivreport.com and is actually better organized than the Drudge site. It auto updates and is chocked full of information. I have it in my bookmarks along with Drudge. In fact, there is a link to Drudge on raivreport along with many other links.

where to begin? cnn, fox, msnbc, cbs, nbc, abc throw around millions of dollars, perhaps billions to present what they call news. all style, no substance. drudge, love him, or hate him, is only the messenger. most of what is on his site is links to the real story, sometimes matt will break a story of his own. granted he only presents headlines of what interests him, and he is a liberitarian, he is for freedom. so he likes to show stories of how and where liberty is lost. also he tries to show stories of the topic of the day. it is my homepage, and is the homepage of anybody i send there. they like the low frills all substance of his site. most major columnists are there, most worldwide news sites are listed there. but no cross promotional stories are there, kinda like c-span. most news broadcasts cross promote their network(s), and make news out of promotions. i think newspapers, and networks can stop looking at his site, and start immitating it, and they might see a increase in viewers, or readers. i stopped my newspaper for drudge, i get just what i want, without the hype.

Maybe Drudge Report is a well-designed website, but as “news” it’s crap. He didn’t report e.g. on the fake Sarkozy call to Palin for example even though that’s just up his alley. Drudge won’t offer a formal retraction or apology for a deflated story, like his claim in 2004 that Kerry was having an affair with an Intern.

I am a fan of Drudge, but for the articles. I find it not only ugly, but a pain to read. So I use a Google widget. I don’t enjoy picking and weeding through the titles. Just another opinion. We all got one! ;-)

I go the DRUDGEREPORT several times a day, It has great links to many very good sites and very diverse they are. Matt Drudge is not afraid to take a shot at anybody and I love that.

PS. I also visit daily his fathers site: www.refdesk.com

The simplest things are the best. How long has the wheel been in style? One shape baby.

Drudge is crisp,quick and usually to the point however his headlines often refer to a small portion of the story and not the storys main point. fark.com is a great companion to drudge.

Thomas Reitz

I agree with Jason. Most people simply don’t believe that LESS really means MORE on the web… 37signals does the same thing and that is why your products rock! I only have one client that understands that less is more because he runs a grocery store and has done thousands upon thousands upon thousands of tests on products!

Drudge is the original blogger. However, instead of writing he uses news stories that matter to him to reflect his views and people still love it.

Absolutely agree with you on this. I keep coming back because it is easy to use, navigate, and I can quickly scan to see if there is anything worthwhile to read about. I wish that the other news sites would be so easy.

There are good aspects of the design that haven’t been replicated by other news sites. The stories are simply and smartly arranged to catch the viewers’ eyeballs. But that’s something largely creditable to the way the site works—with a single editor who is controlling all of the content.

However, when you say that the ugliness is part of the good design of the site, you’re also saying that the site wouldn’t be better if it were less ugly. The site design may be iconic, but if it were originally designed in Arial with nice spacing and margins instead of Courier with bad spacing it wouldn’t be any less iconic. It’s iconic because of the format of the site, not because of the font and spacing. Drudge may have choose Courier because he wanted it to appear like a news sheet.. but that doesn’t mean its the appeal of the site.

Drudge could also make editing the site a lot easier for himself if he based the site design on CSS or even an XSL transform, something that wasn’t really an option when he started the site. You’d understand if you ever tried to parse the Drudge Report HTML—it’s a complete mess.

I’ve gone through that myself—-making my own user style with Firefox’s Stylish extension:

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/brianshapiro/drudgereport_styled_clip.jpg

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/brianshapiro/drudgereport_styled.jpg

If users had the option between an ugly Drudge site and a pretty Drudge site-everything else being equal-and 95/100 chose the pretty Drudge site, would that mean 95% of people have bad taste according to you?

Next you’ll say that the annoying flash advertisements ad to the ‘charm’ of the site.

way to get free traffic by kissing ass!

I started reading Drudge 96’ish and recognized it as art immediately, maybe my first visit. As a computer programmer, and I’d say 80% of the best sites are designed by site owners with no technical or graphic design experience. They just have a straightforward message they are focused in getting across.

It’s vomit ugly. But I still visit it about 30 times a day.

Proves content is king.

I agree. Drudge clears the muck and speaks clearly.

Simple is beautiful.

redfish get another line of work if you’re in web design. The only thing sacred is getting the message across.

I love the Drudge Report because it’s EASY TO READ! The fonts are big. On CNN, MSNBC, Newsmax.com etc. they all look alike with their teeny fonts that you can barely read. Important articles all look the same. The best about Drudge’s sight is that the fonts are big and bold and you just click on what you want to read. I love it, it’s like shopping for your favorite things, you just click away.

I think Drudge is a master of studying the news and what is being presented by the major media outlets, and then providing links to stories or developing stories himself that fill in the missing parts. I watch the major media outlets, and check Drudge, and between the two I get the full picture and can make up my own mind. Without Drudge, we only get the liberal slant. I am usually amazed at what the regular media outlets don’t report.

Jeff Savage

Your assesment is Drudgey itself! Your impressions of DR is a lot like the site itself: to the point, no fluff, substantive and accurate.

I check DR as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning, several times an hour (or throughout the day) as I have viewed it constantly and daily since the 90’s. I reccommend it, but, do not spend much time trying to sell it to those unfamiliar with it, because “pop-culturists” need color, fluff and bull ** and DR tends not to fall into such catagories.

What was most interesting, if not somewhat frustrating, it was impossible to detect a political slant of Drudge by viewing his page during the most recent election season.

I find his photographs MOST impressive and I rarely see them anywhere else. WHERE DOES DRUDGE GET THOSE PHOTOS?

Keep up the fantastic work Matt (Drudge.)

One thing don’t like about his site is the photos never have links to the original source—-many times I wanted to see the photos larger, but wasn’t able to. I’d like the photos to have links.

Jim - Does it make me a bad web design guy for suggesting that? No, obviously Drudge can do things to make his site better.

I don’t care if it is the best designed, best looking web site out there… if it refreshes out from under me before I can even read through the titles it is PURE GARBAGE.

Why in the world does he have to have it refresh every couple minutes… that is pure stupidity. It’s not as if the articles are updated every single minute… jeezus, I can refresh the stinking screen when I want new data, give me a break and get rid of the stupid auto refresh!!!!!

Drudge is the design winner!

Drudge manages to make all the eye candy… to be all the things we WANT to see (content). All the other sites make the eye candy what THEY want you to see (crap).

I love it. Drudge’s plain vanilla site inspired me to design my commercial website (products) in a similar, plain, straight up style.

Viva Drudge. Timeless….

My favorite moranic comments I have seen so far:

“I stayed 10 seconds the first time I heard of it 5 years ago and never went back, entirely based on how hard it is to read and evaluate the sources.”

—-Ummm, yeah, stayed ten seconds, could not evaluate. Did you even click on a link to another site?

“As noted above, opinion and news are freely blended (intentionally?) on his site and not labelled as such. This may sucker the rubes, but not more sophisticated readers”

—-Well yeah, if the reader can’t tell they are being “linked” to another site, another source, well, they need to get back into web 101.

“The real brilliance of the Drudge Report, if it can be said there is any, is that there’s so much awful, worthless nonsense strewn throughout it that it forces the reader to look at most of it just to find anything worth actually reading.”

—Yes thank you! I agree with you. That damn breitbart site that he links to. Yes that AP garbage that that guy pulls news from. Yeah, that AP stuff is absolutely trash!

The Ronin Edge

I have been a graphic artist for 18 years and I am laughing my butt off right now at all of these pretious people who are letting their personal opinions of Matt Drudges percieved politics impact their opinions. Take off the lib-goggles. I see a site that is prectically free to operate, that a simpleton running Adobe Pagemill 1.0 could update, and is simple enough that my computer illiterate mother can navigate without me holding her hand. And it’s making more than $1,000,000.00 a year in profit.

The success of the site is the final arbiter of it’s design merits. Why?

Function > Form

I have always believed this. Your design should never start to impede the functionality of a product, and if it starts to, then you have failed in the most important aspect of your work, be it a beer can logo, letterhead, or a web page.

Example: That pretty flash banner is nice the first time you visit a site. It’s just slowing you down every single time after that. It becomes a nusance. Another 458k to download every time you hit the page. Unneccessary fly-out windows, (curse you son of suckerfish!!!!), large header files, slowly populating ajax or .php form data that takes forever to load make sites a pain to manuever through on anything short of an OC3.

This is why web 2.0 was and is still so popular. It remembers that first and formost, you MUST have a functional product, and that must temper any artistic impulses you have.

Save the wild javascript, ajax, and flash goodness for your portfolio or your personal website. Wow them at the interview, but for god sakes, keep a functional site minimalistic. Wikipedia, Google, Drudge, Youtube, and a host of other “content” driven sites realize this.

The Japanese woodblock printers understood this principle. Compare the woodcuts of the Japanese masters to the copper plates of gothic europe.

When 1 simple line will do… why clutter it up with a bunch of cross hatching and multiple acid etches? Soft. Less is more.

Success is what I see when I look at Drudge’s site. If only the bulky, slow to load, expensive site we just built for GoG, for tens of thousands of dollars would see a fraction of the traffic. Sure, it has a giant flash animation, google adds poping up every time someone mouses over every other word, and in my opinion, the site drowns in it’s own list of features.

Like I said, unless your creative impulses are going to signifigantly improve the use of the product, reign them in.

People are not buying your graphic design work. They are buying/using a product, and your job is to enhance it’s appeal, while at the same time, staying the hell out of it’s way.

Congratulations on a well constructed essay on a very legitimate and credible subject.

It is no surprise that some dolt from the Looney Left dropped by and sent out the alarm.

What arrogance and hipocrisy.

This article was spot-on! Everything you wrote is exactly how I feel about Drudge. I can not get enough of it either!

I love this article for having the guts to tell it like it is. We need more websites with the practical design shown by Drudge. It is great to find a website that clearly shows that content means more than “cute” or “pretty” or whatever is “in” this week. I vote for a goodbye to chic-chic cutie websites and let’s get on with information distribution. Also, his website was designed to fit into any shape monitor unlike those web designers who are forcing everyone to use their horizontal scroll bars just because “they” purchased landscape shaped monitors. Designers don’t read the news anyway, they are too busy looking in the mirror and going to design shows, so what do they know about people who like to read and quickly scan pages for the latest information? 3 big cheers for Drudge!!!

Brilliant post… really, really brilliant.

But, you forgot one of the most basic tenets of his appeal—the man has a nose for news. And no one but NO ONE, has the influence he has over the national news cycle. Read Drudge in the morning, then listen to talk radio during the day and then cable TV news that night, and you’ll immediately see what I mean.

P.P.S. - You must have a killer server cluster, because a link from Drudge can take down a small site in seconds. ;)

Great article! Nailed it over and over and over again.

Chas Holloway

We might also add that Drudge has become the most influential news source in the world. Every “mainstream” newsroom is in his wake.

Roving Karl

This article nails it. The answer to newspaper-Web convergence is right there in front of them, but the industry execs are too stupid to jot down the answer.

I find it funny, when i’ve read some of these comments, and see “I can’t find anything, it’s so disorganized, the layout is horrible”. People, it’s three columns. Three simple areas of anywhere from 8-12 or so links. You scan down the first column, up the second, down the third. Bam! Done. If you see something interesting to you, click on the link! I visit Drudge 5-7 times a day. Down, Up, Down, done for another 3-4 hours. So easy, so perfect. Kudo’s to drudge.

I have never understood why people say they don’t visit Drudge because he is bias.. he doesn’t write anything he just links to other bias news media. LOL

Mike, St. Louis

This is an excellent write up. I have always liked the Drudge Report. You including some things that I didn’t even think about. My major annoyance with other websites is that they are too cluttered with random stuff that it just annoys me. With Drudge, it is straight forward. I also love the fact that they have links to not only hundreds of columnists, both right leaning and left leaning, but tons of links to other news sights.

Somewhere out there, Jakob Nielsen is reading this and shedding a tear…

Drudge is a good snapshot and I often check it once or twice a day. My complaint is that with dial-up connection (rural) the page tries to “reload” before it has time to fully load. And the reload is BS way to up your “hits” count.

Rich San Diego

I was having this exact conversaton with someone and they told me I was crazy for saying this is the best designed site on the web. There are no navigational issues. There aren’t 1,252 boxes that want to do this or that. You don’t have to sign in, touch your nose, or try to figure out what its doing. He could care less about sticky. He knows you’re not going to be there long. All the traditonal media did on the web was take their regular crappy designs and make an even bigger mess online. Somebody gets it.

Go Drudge. Simple layout, easy to navigate. Get my news from Drudge and raivreport.com. It too is simple and easy to navigate. News is current, no hype and commercial free. I like that. Watch out Drudge.

If you don’t like the content of The Drudge Report that is your problem. The article is about the format of the web page. I agree this is a great web page. It’s clean, concise and straight forward. I use it as my home page. I find that easiest because I go to this page several times each day. My only problem with The Drudge Report page is it refreshes itself every few minutes on it’s own. I would prefer to do this myself.

As a blind individual, Drudge offers a layout that provides brainless navigating for those that must rely on screen readers.

people who don’t like the style must not like the old fashioned newspaper, because imho, drudge’s website design is simply designed as a newspaper. but instead of having 2 or 3 or 4 articles start on page one…drudge’s site consists of nothing but links…

Drudge is my homepage. I used to check out Huffington’s site too everyday, but haven’t touched that site in over a year. I’ve tried other news outlets like Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, but don’t use them anymore.

Plenty of news sources like wapo, ny times, etc., but you can count on Drudge getting something you want to read that the other popular news sites won’t have.

Never realized he made so much money. Good for him.

What some graphic artist think is pleasing to the eye kills us users. I don’t want color or anything that flashes or pops up. I want a little color and headlines.

Graphic artist should look at USA Today and Drudge’s success and see this is what people want. As best I can remember USA Today has only updated their look once back in the early 90’s and though it is acceptable I still prefer the original.

I doubt I’m in a minority when I say simple, clean and easy to use it what I want. Not to say sites like ESPN don’t have their place but if I want quick news I go to Drudge. If I want a newspaper I buy local or USA Today.

Absolutely the site is well-designed. It has not changed in ten years. Any web designer who thinks it is ugly has a sick sense of beauty. In particular he is likely to think it is ugly because it is low maintenance and he can’t think of a way to make much money in implementing it. The site works.

Drudge Report looks great when viewed in Firefox with Adblock Plus to block the ads and also Element Hiding Helper to block the whitespace, etc.

The site is good because it is reliable and it is bleeding edge breaking. That’s what people come back for, the up-to-the-second content. That’s great, and I applaud Drudge for that and wish him many more millions…

But, that is done in spite of the (lack of) design.

It is not iconic because it hasn’t changed since 1997. It’s a relic. That’s not great branding. That’s de-prioritized design, because it’s a site of topical links.

It’s not great because it doesn’t require a CMS, that’s the bi-product of the business decision to limit to one page of topical links. Since when is a site’s CMS-ness become a barometer of it’s design greatness anyway?

Excellent post. Thanks.

Are you nuts? He links to everything from the New York Times to NewsMax. Name a better source. DailyKos (gag)? HuffingtonPost? Your blog roll? Tell me. I honestly want to know.

Not to mention you don’t have to try and type in something like ‘MPlam872rr SiCKloO’ with line crossed through it to look at the site. Usually I’m told to try again when I try and figure that crap out.

I hate the design of the Drudge Report.

1. Why not sort the articles into columns by topics? Politics, economy, international or other.

2. Ditch the pictures unless they’re important. They just add unnecessary clutter.

3. Clearly separate ads from content. This would become moot if #2 was observed as a picture would be assumed an ad. Also, put a horizontal divider across the bottom of the article links to set apart the links to other homepages.

4. Add some sort of timestamp so I don’t have to read every headline when I’ve already read half of them before. Some sort of color coding that indicates the age of the headline could be used or a horizontal line that divides into two-hour sections. Better yet, just change the font color of headlines that were downloaded before.

Just because the site is uniquely ugly and disorganized doesn’t mean its a great site.

That all said, I visit the Drudge 5-10 times a day. Its definately a love/hate thing.

I also check the site 5-10 times a day.

I use DrudgeReport as my HomePage. It is fast loading, complete and easy to read.

Drudge is a news dashboard that is familiar and reliable.

His take on headlines is refreshing, as he can write an editorial in just a few words:

“Senate youth movement?: 90-year-old Byrd replaced by ‘slightly younger’ 84-year-old Inouye on committee…”

His “flashbacks” are clever and stinging and without writing an article, he manages to show how lazy and forgetful the press has become.

“ROBIN WILLIAMS TO REHAB…

FLASHBACK: Mocked Limbaugh Addiction in July…”

DrudgeReport is successful, cause he is the only one who determines what to post.

It let’s him be nimble, and be a Journalist, which we all know he is, and exceptional one.

He puts headlines up only, the newest with pictures,

and the simple web design let’s him be a news man, not a web/computer guy,

I go there to see the headlines, and then read the articles, he is usually guicker posting these headlines then any other news source, he dosen’t have to justifiy why he is posting what he posts. And Millions trust his judgement, it’s that simple.

The DRUDGE REPORT is the first item of business I turn to, it is a remarkable place to be.

So many blowhards cannot stand Drudge simply because of the fact that he is now doing what the mainstream media used to do: report the news. If you notice, his page is entirely links to other news sites. He just uses headlines to call attention to them. Some call it ugly. Some call it boring. I just call it effective and efficient. Also, one of the best things about his site is the fact that below the news links are links to other columnists and publications in alphabetical order from around the world. What more could you want?

This post made it as a link on Drudge!

I’ve have seen enough, I am going to drudge to scan headlines like I do about 8 times a day.

mary grossman

I have been a Drudgehead for over a decade. To me, Matt is an artist; that is the only way I can describe what he does. The whole page should be viewed like a canvas, a painting; and taken in in its entirety. The entire page is how Matt sees life as it is this very moment. Like an photographer who reveals the brutal honesty of the moment, Matt knows when to click.

THE KISS PRINCIPLE…

KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID…

A MARINE THING…

Hey Ryno. The raivreport sections are titled the way you say. They have photos but not the same ones all the time. It also does not update on its own. Have a lot of stock news to.

a couple of years ago…

Drudge posted a 9.8 earthquake…

“somewhere in the Pacific”...

I thought…”someone is going to get wet…”

“the rest of the story…”

Dudes in Indonesia…

Shoulda been readin’ DRUDGE>>>>

It’s a load of bollocks, and one in a stream of “hey, let’s take a widely criticized site, call it awesome, and everyone will praise how witty and insightful we are.” It’s as if everyone thinks they can be hailed as geniuses if they rebel against the norm.

Design is not synonymous with utility, and the Drudge Report fails horribly at both.

I’ve included a screenshot. THIS IS WHAT I SEE WHEN I LOAD THE PAGE.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v252/Kadjar/shit.jpg

It’s patently absurd to call this good design. from first load, I don’t even know what the page is.

Sites that are successful yet have bad design aren’t necessarily successful BECAUSE of bad design (therefore making it good?), but IN SPITE of. This is the same reason Fox is #1 in viewership despite their utter lack of journalistic integrity, taste, and quality. Fox isn’t #1 because it’s good news, it’s #1 because right-wingers have nowhere else to go. The Drudge Report isn’t popular because of it’s piss poor design, it’s popular because right-wingers surf it religiously.

The Drudge Report hasn’t changed the design, ever. This could mean that the first design was perfect. It could also mean that Matt Drudge simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t mean that the users love the design… they could be sticking around because no other site has the content they desire.

“There are no tricks, no sections, no deep linking, no special technology required. It’s all right there on one page. “But it’s a mess!” you could say. I’d say “it’s straightforward mess.” I wouldn’t underestimate the merit in that.”

There ARE sections… if you can suffer to scroll down far enough. Straightforward = good. Mess = bad. Straightforward + mess = good & bad. Straightforward + non-mess = good & good, i.e., better design.

It’s unique. Certainly. So is every dump I’ve squeezed out of my anus. There’s a REASON the news sites look alike. They WANT to look alike. When you go to CNN.com, without even seeing content, the users say, “oh, this is a news site.” Is it bad to have a news site look like a news site? Saying it’s unique and therefore good is flawed logic – you and i have discussed this before.

It’s important. Drudge isn’t afraid to be noisy. Sure. That’s an appeal of the Drudge Report, and is totally irrelevant to the design. The argument here is for the philosophy of the site, which 37S claims to be good and extraordinary. Fine. Keep the philosophy. Keep a super noisy headline – the site could have top-notch design, and a screaming headline…(get this)... AT THE SAME TIME.

It’s cluttered. It’s messy, and there’s no good flow to the information. “Jason” thinks that constitutes… good design? The design doesn’t “encourage wandering,” it just requires effort to plow through. It’s successful because the users feel that the plowing is worth it. Just because it functions now doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. I wonder how many people don’t visit the site for specifically that reason.

Breaking news. Once again, this is a philosophy of the Drudge Report, and not one of the website design. This could be maintained, regardless of design.

One guy can run it. That’s a plus. One guy can also make a myspace page, or a geocities home. That doesn’t make good design, and is more a question of web authoring tools. With tools powerful enough, one guy could nearly run any site on the web. The design could be significantly improved, and still have one guy do it.

No news… once again, Drudge philosophy and concept. Not design. The design is the implementation of the concept, and not having direct info isn’t implementation in this case – it IS the concept.

Sending people away… see above.

It’s fast. That’s definitely a plus. I’ll grant that. However, with a little organization, better fonts, and better layout, the design could be improved without sacrificing speed. It’s cheap. See above. It’s one page. See above.

It makes him a great living – A site’s success can be completely irrelevant to design. See above discussion of Fox.

All in all, it’s bad design. It may function. It may serve a purpose. However, Drudge’s design limps blindly on like the buffoon in the White House he was so fond of.

Jack Elliot

Umm, I wonder if there are even any web professionals in this comment section.

Drudge could dramatically increase portability and decrease the page filesize with a little bit of CSS and the dropping of the table tag.

Also, WHY NO RSS?! This is my main beef with the site.

Drudge IS one of the best designed sites, and I really think it’s a huge factor in it’s success. Most web sites are buried in a deluge of flashy graphics, automatically loading video that’s, java applets, etc. It can make it difficult to even find what you’re looking for. With Drudge there’s very little hype or BS, at most a major story is in red lettering. And when Drudge puts something in red, you KNOW it’s important.

They need to implement RSS. I’m a huge fan of the site, but it’s absolutely ridiculous that they haven’t implemented RSS yet.

They could EASILY do this without affecting the site’s simplicity or ease of maintenance.

A car that is beautifully designed but does not work fails its purpose and is useless.

One cannot completely separate design from function. In this busy, ultra-competitive world, Drudge works. He respects the visitor’s time and delivers clean, clear links to information in a clear, quickly downloadable format.

Works for me. I wish all my vendors web sites were this plain vanilla, functional, see everything at once. MAybe when he gets more info to post, hell add a tab or two. Most artistically designed sites are a pain to use, takes forever to get any information. And 20 years ago they all said, make sure you use fonts and colors sensibly and a week later everyone was using anything but. I like plain vanilla fonts. Oh and the artist geniuses make web pages unreadable by putting pictures under the text. Reall groovy…

“Your design should never start to impede the functionality of a product, and if it starts to, then you have failed in the most important aspect of your work, be it a beer can logo, letterhead, or a web page” I agree completely. If your a person that sees beauty in a Jeep( or better still a Toyota Landcruiser), or a Snocat, or a Steerman then you probably get Drudge.

Michael de Angelos

I agree totally-even though I can’t stand Drudge’s obvious political stance and skewered presentation( which at least he doesn’t hide), it’s a must visit everyday.

I’ve really never thought about the design of the site. You’re absolutely right. All I know is that I have used it as my home page since it first launched all those many years ago. I can’t even begin to imagine how many visits I have made to the site.

Another thing I think you overlooked is that it’s accurate. By which I mena I’ve never found a bad link or faulty headline. What you see is what you get. Too many times with news sites, content is only accessible by signing up for something (even if free), links don’t work, or something is awry in the content. I was on one site the other day for Houston, I believe, where the article was about Obama’s Cabinet picks and the photos were of some high school football game.

Drudge has been the first page I go to in the morning and the last one I check before bed daily for over 10 years, and I check it several times a day from my mobile, too. I’m a news junkie, I read more than 100 different newspapers a week from around the world online, but Drudge remains my 1st stop because unlike so many others he is all about content. It’s not his content most of the time, but it’s content.

I want news. I want to read it instead of watching video. I don’t want a lot of flashy graphics, and I certainly don’t want anything coming out my computer speakers while I’m reading unless I choose to load it. I want it to load fast and quietly without unnecessary graphics, scripts, popups, and logins or any other distractions.

I never go to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc unless I want to read something Drudge linked because of these preferences. Even though I read so many news sources online I find he nearly always gets headlines before I do, and he finds the best versions of the stories. For instance, there might be an AP story on thousands of pages on the net, but Drudge always links to the one with the one that focuses on content instead of distractions – fewer ads, faster loads, less bandwidth, same news.

He gets it. It’s why he’s the best. I agree with every single thing you said. I do wish it didn’t refresh as often as it does though. Sometimes when on my mobile it’s still loading the page when it refreshes. AHHHHH I didn’t make it to the bottom yet and now I’m back at the top. Frustrating…

It’s simple and addictive. I used to think it conjured up the best of the old-school journalist ‘style’, but for the last few years it’s been developing a ‘mood’ or ‘tone’ (yeah, without original content) that depresses the hell out of me. I couldn’t be happier with Matt’s success, however. God knows he’s worked hard for it.

Michael said Drudge has no archives? Look again.

I definitely don’t agree and I frequent the site. I agree with the op when they said design 3 sites and let the users choose which interface is more usable. Right now there is nothing to compare the site to so of course is well designed, thats’ wall way know and old is comfortable.

Bill Lothian

I kind of like the HinesSight—the Anti-Drudge better…

http://www.hinessight.com

Matt Travis

There’s no b/s with it. You go there to get what you want (headline leads) and you’re not bothered with any b/s that gets in your way. “The facts ma’am, just the facts” It’s elegeance in simplicity, but it’s 100% functional simplicity.. designed to get a job done and does it well. My only complaint would be the big ad at the top (which gets Matt $$$$$$$$$$$$ each month) but even it’s become kind of iconic and you almost get curious about what ad will be there next. Today it was “Hillary Swank” to which I thought “whatthe…”

Dan Empfield

I used to hate the Drudge Report, but I have come to realize its genius.

I truly realized it was non-partisan in the last year or so when they defended Hillary Clinton, and I now bookmark Drudge ever morning.

You know, I’m a big DR fan. And I am certainly no designer or critic of design. And I’m not really very political. I call myself a fiscally conservative, social liberal. And the biggest thing I appreciate about DR is that while he may be personally biased, he obviously is willing to destroy either side. And he doesn’t inject his bias into every link. But as I have read this post up to here, I have looked at all of the alternative sites that have been suggested. An example is buzzflash. Right now on DR there are no derogatory comments against Dems. BF on the otherhand has wildly glowing titles on lefties or insulting headlines on righties. Every one. Their purpose is clear. DR is willing to give you all the dirt. If that’s not integrity then what is. He doesn’t care who he destroys merely by pointing. He just let’s everyone else do it for him. And if that’s not style…

Phylis Chase

You’ve attached the word ugly to the Drudge site. Unadorned is not ugly…it makes it easier to get to the point and hit the headlines without a lot of loading time for graphic hoohaas that take the focus off the news. I think the DrudgeReport is beautiful in its simplicity. I could do without the red siren…it scares me to death… red siren should only mean WORLD ENDING in my book, and you can be sure I write to Matt Drudge and tell him that yearly…..

god I LOVE THE DRUDGE.

I remember the day I knew he was the toast of the news world.

Mike Isikoff had the goods, he was breaking the Monica (right wing extremists made me do it) Slewinsky (mispelled on purpose) story and he worked at Newsweek.

The true people like myself had already breathed the wonderful oxygen that Drudge gave us, it was amazing a class act news service that gave us BOTH SIDES, we had never seen that before,

but when Newsweek threatened to fire Mike for breaking the biggest story in history on “their” guy

DRUDGE BROKE THE MONICA STORY AND HE WAS A STAR

Although for years the “serious” “classy” newsman like (Mr. Lying, Make-up-the facts) Dan Rather said that he wasn’t vetted, no one went behind and checked his facts, blah blah blah, all the while they were tingling over the liberals.

The stats are out, his site beats em all together, congratulation Matt, you became great when it wasn’t cool, keep it up, you deserve everything!

Slowly but surely the world trusts Drudge more than ABCNBCCBSPBSPBRCNBCCNNMSNBC and if it ain’t on Drudge

IT JUST AIN’T THE NEWS

One last thing, If you can’t skim thru all the headlines in a couple of minutes before the site refreshes, you obviously don’t get how it works.

As best I can tell, your argument goes thus: If you sit on a big enough pile of crap for long enough, it hardens, and all of a sudden you’re on top of a mountain. I disagree.

Isaac Garcia

Drudge rocks – for years. Sure he is political – who the f-ck isn’t?

BTW, Jason, I found this post via DrudgeReport – he is linking to this article.

Look at the left column nav:

http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2008/11/20/20081120_013824.htm

I accept the UGLY design as a reflection of the site’s political leanings.

Isaac, how do you think I got here!

I love DR and I have it set for my home page and have since I started going online about 10 years ago. I’ve tried setting a couple of other favorites as home but I know it is Drudge that I want to check each time I go up. btw, I find it easy to negotiate as I know where I am on it and where to go for my favorites, which I have long ago stopped bookmarking because DR has already done that for me. THANKS Drudge Report!!!!!

I agree and it’s one of the key reasons drudge is my primary news source. I find the classification of news and/or verbose headlines on all other sites and aggregators to be inefficient. I can hit up drudge and within 10 seconds know if there is anything meaningful I’ve missed.

DustyGriswall

I love DrudgeReport. I give annual DrudgeReport gift subscriptions to my liberal in-laws. They in turn feel a need to reciprocate and give me socks for Christmas.

Yes, timely news and free socks, courtesy of Drudge and really stupid in-laws.

DRUDGE IS THE VERY BEST WE CAN GO ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD FROM DRUDGE LOVE IT!!!

I always thought it was ugly but I can’t stay away from it. I visit the website daily, in fact, most days I visit it several times. One gets all the news not just the managed news reports. I love it!

It’s almost addictive. It’s easy, fast, and to the point without the talking points. I don’t trust the regular media outlets. My wife thought I was a freak cause I would check it at least twice a day, then she got hooked too. Any site that can get 37,000,000 hits in a month is doing something right.

I like Drudge Report but I hate the meta refresh. Most in the industry know page “impressions” are a broken metric. Remove the meta refresh and the numbers go down. It will still be a popular site and deservedly so but please make it stop.

Someone earlier made the comment that drudge’s content is not actually legitimate or reliable. How the crap is CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC or any other of those biased news stations actually delivering actual quality journalism? They’re not. This past election was proof of how journalism, especially in America, is headed down the toilet. How can over 80% of news stories run on Obama be positive, while only around 7% run on McCain were? It’s ludicrous. I think every civilian wants the opportunity to hear and view quality, unbiased reporting. Can I get an Amen?

Btw, I check the Drudge at least once a day and love the content. Keep up the good work.

Wait, do people really not read Drudge because it “looks” bad? Ha! I could seriously care less how a website looks if it has content that interest me.

Do you only watch movies for the special effects and CGI as well?

Sorry, but I skimmed these comments. I may be repeating something already said.

Drudge is a page that WORKS. It functions. There are no whirling icons leading you to widgets and plug-ins and other cross-marketing hoo-ha that dominates the rest of the web. When you click a link on Drudge, you normally GET the content you REQUESTED.

That’s an abnormal concept for most web designers. I have to guess they are paid by the “click,” because it takes a thousand clicks these days just to perform a simple function like getting your email or reading other news outlet.

Over-design is the going to be the death of the internet. The user wants fast, quick and simple results to their searches. Google is another perfect example of good design.

The rest of the internet sucks… GarageBand.com? MySpace? Yahoo? It takes ten-thousand clicks displaying whirling advertising banners for products you will never buy, just to figure-out your way through the login process..

There is no need to bury the information, to make your webpage more “sexy” looking and cool.

But what to I know?

I love Drudge because it is like reading the front page of the paper. I get to go there, glance around, pick what interests me and read it with my morning coffee. Then I usually check it once more at night. I love the international stories he features. I now read London papers more the U.S papers online. (they seem more balanced and they don’t feel so busy and like they are “shouting”.) One point you made is how generic and alike the websites like CNN and MSNBC look, and also they are so cluttered and annoying with their ticker tape style “headlines” that aren’t really headlines at all. Good assessment, thanks!

STOP THE META-REFRESH…

Can’t stand a site that thinks they know better than me when I want to refresh the screen… that’s idiotic.

Boris Nicoloff

You are absolutely right. And thank you for saying so in no uncertain terms.

One thing not mentioned in the article is that the site broke the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton relationship story that Newsweek decided not to run that week. Drudge Report is basically to the internet what early TV was to those who saw Lee Harvey Oswald get assassinated on TV. Once you see that, you don’t ever want to stop watching TV in case you might miss something good. The same thing now with the Drudge Report. The simple design is very good I think, it loads quick and offers links to other great news sites and stories. I prefer Google News these days which is somewhat based on the same premises, but it’s more organized and isn’t as political or partisan as Matt Drudge can be at times.

try opening it in a text browser and see that it is a horrible design.

Good, honest article. The Drudge Report is my internet home page. Considering all of the boiler-plate links Drudge has built into his site, and the constantly changing headlines, its perfect if you have a few minutes to kill and want to know what is going on.

Long live Matt Drudge !

I agree i love the minimal rss reader feel to the site… however, i wish the mobile portal worked better to that most links could be enabled for mobile use..

Refresh the page and triple to 100 times your hits..Its the money stupid..Now I am not going back to the main page cos Drudge boy has had his refresh from me today..and one he is going to get.. Ask yourself what happenens when you fall asleep on the settee watching CNN ..forgeting you have the Drudge page still of the screen…millions just millions

I’m “non-techie” but somewhat computer literate and I find myself bewildered by some of the conclusions and reasoning expressed here. I am especially surprised by all the “techies” who apparently didn’t or can’t understand the article.

The DR is successful because it works! It’s an easy to use freaking launch point! (sorry if that is NOT an approved techie term.) Headlines/links from ALL OVER THE MSM and not-so-MSM on top and links to papers, columnists and some handy reference sites below. I… the average Drudge reader… go there several times a day for quick headline review and to link to the several papers and columnists I check daily. It’s a great set of bookmarks for me AND I know how to page down. I know what’s there… figured that out upon my first visit years ago. Thanks, Matt, for Keeping It Simple.

It’s not pretty; it’s fast and EASY TO USE! It’s about the content; i.e. links to news/opinion sites on the web. It is all about function!!!!! Not pretty graphics, fonts, pop-ups or roll-over adds. I had a great looking coffee maker once; looked really pretty on the counter and garnered me a lot of compliments. I guess the fact that it made lousy coffee would be unimportant to some of the “web-designers” that responded here.

Then again… maybe I just have a severely underdeveloped sense of the “web aesthetic.” Those of us in the mouth-breathing, knuckle dragging and gun-toting populace of fly over country have an unfortunate habit of preferring the right tool for the job at hand.

Good take. Drudge has been the first place I look since he began. I appreciate you pointing out why it’s so good. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s enough room for two black & white, ugly, 1 page new sites that nets over $1,000,000 a year for the 1 man operator.

An interesting comparison is Google’s “News”. Automatically generated and, at least to me, devoid of personality (logically enough) and Boring.

CharlieSmite

The first few comments on this page were great, and then the comments degraded into pretentious partisanship from people who seemed to have never even read the site.

One commentator stated that Drudge maintained that newspaper feel online which is something many other newspaper web sites are unable to do, and I think that is an astute observation.

Drudge is very designed:

1) The choice of links over short descriptions or blurbs.

2) The choice of a three-column layout.

3) The choice of the black on white contrast.

4) The choice of grouping similar links together to create a theme over the course of several days.

5) The choice of auto-refreshing the page to make people stick around.

The elitists on this page who cannot see the design of Drudge because of their own bias are morons who will never be successful. They will continue to over design their websites and create flash and javascript menus (like the Huffington Post) that often don’t work and take precious seconds to load.

its good, but i hate the constant updating(every couple of minutes). even when theres nothing new it updates and takes you back to the top(very annoying).

Paul Fallavollita

Definitely agree that the design of the Drudge Report is a model to emulate…it’s clean and simple and easy to maintain. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as they say. Too many people seem eager to convert the Internet into a form of television. Drudge has staying power. I’d like to see him come out with another book, btw.

Benny Smith

I think it’s great!

jas wats, anyone can scan in a couple of minutes, unless we’re doing other stuff, ie. multi-tasking. So i still say drop the meta-refresh and its great.

RE:heideman

This is a great example of the reason why the left wing needs a dose of reality. The filth, Democrats, leftists, marxists and communists want to read can be found on PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, and all of them should be renamed the Democrat Channels.

Drudge wins because he keeps his editorial effort in short descriptions and choice of subject and makes no effort to pretend otherwise. This makes him one of a kind among the news media.

His design is like great weapon design. The only thing that matters is results and his is unquestionable.

I classify Drudge as the purveyor of an art form.

I agree. One of the reasons I view drudgereport.com multiple times daily is for the news others underreport. There are several other sites included here, like the nranews.com and government legislation status websites. But drudge is the format I perfer.

”... my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose.”

Good design includes both the aesthetic and the functional. It includes all of those things. As you say, the things Drudge Report excels at are maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose. What Drudge Report is is superbly functional.

His masthead is like an old friend. You know what you’re going to get – without the glitz!

Sleazy at times, but usually pretty accurate.

And he’s been doing this since 1995 (or since he was part of the AOL empire, which he separated from after the Blumenthal affair).

He also posts some of the best, funny, pictures of prominent figures that I’ve ever seen!

Love Drudge. I can scan those headlines and see right away what I want to read. Invaluable.

Why are those who don’t like the Drudge Report reading it? I don’t care how it looks – I just want to be able to skim through the headlines, read further the ones that interest me and do it all quickly. I check it several times a day to see if or what new items have been added. I think it is darn near perfect and appreciate the effort put into it. Thanks Mr. Drudge.

The Drudge Report RULES MY WORLD. I am an addict and check it throughout the day. It’s like heroin.

When I want information at the office, I go to the file cabinet.

When I want information on the news, I go to Drudge’s file cabinet.

I am conservative, and although I find his cabinet loaded with liberal folders, I am bright enough to winnow out, sooner or later, the conservative columnists I want to read. I freely declare that I wouldn’t touch, for example, the Huffington Puffington Post with a 10-foot pole !! But then, I also find Ann Coulter a bit tedious now and then.

However, my objective in visiting Drudge’s web site is to find out what’s happening in the world, not what mud liberals and conservatives are slinging at each other. That is the main reason I go to Drudge rather than the web sites of the network news, the “leading” newspapers, or any magazine’s web sites. It’s a waste of my valuable time, trying to sift through their weather site, their classified site, their never-ending subscription promos, their “star” reporter’s profiles, etc., etc., etc., as well as having to decode under what category they may have placed the article which I am interested in reading.

The clear, crisp, concise design of Drudge’s page is a welcome relief from all the glitzy, cluttered, self-promoting drivel on the individual news agency’s web site.

Those of you who speak of design are similar to the Hollywood types who give awards to themselves, then sell the video to the networks for millions of dollars. They are of importance only to themselves. However, they must make a living somehow, as we all must, including the smug web site designers posting here.

Yes, smug. What is the matter with you people, to presume that you know what design is best, when I, the consumer, am busy deciding on my own behalf exactly what works best for me? I think I smell the acrid odor of jealousy in the air.

Drudge searches out the relevant, the humorous, the heart-warming, the absurd, the best … and sometimes the worst … reporting of the day.

I find his file cabinet of archived articles helpful when I need to find the reference for a particular quote I’m using in my work. His archive is very easy to locate on his web site … at least, I had no trouble locating it, but I don’t pretend to speak for everyone.

I’ll vote for clear, crisp, concise design every time. Prove to me that Drudge’s format is not a valid design strategy. It sure works for me !!

Here’s a tip, free of charge, for all you web site designers: I really, really, REALLY appreciate the large print used on Drudge’s web page. I have vision problems, so I need the larger print.

xesenta.com

Matt is my buddy(sic). And he is a professional SIN-sationalist! I applaud all that with BOTH my design degrees.

BUT – there are certain low hanging fruit that he cannot TOUCH – and that’s where XESENTA comes in. I won’t spam you. U’ll haffi click my NAME to link to my site! careful! its PG-13! and u will love how DRUDGE like it is! ;)

As a web developer, I find most of this article’s points valid, but the third paragraph of the “good clutter” argument is preposterous, clearly going against tested usability principles. Bad usability and good design are mutually exclusive. That said, I follow the Drudge Report daily, but can only manage to follow his updates through a bootleg RSS feed. It’s very difficult to keep up otherwise, with the content randomly moving around. That equals bad design! It’s alarming that the highly-regarded 37Signals is lending credibility to that aspect of Drudge’s approach.

Those of you who say “anyone can scan in a few seconds” are wrong. On broadband at home yes I can scan it quickly and even open several pages in tabs before it refreshes. However, when connected though many wireless networks and often with my mobile device or card i can’t even scroll from top to bottom before it refreshes.

And yes, I do mean simply scroll the headlines without stopping to open anything. It must be a nightmare for those who are on dial-up because I am using both 3G and EVDO for wireless and that’s usually faster than dial-up even with a bad signal. I travel a lot so I have lots of mobile connections and devices, and the difference in my Drudge experience between broadband and bad signal areas on my wireless networks is huge.

I like the meta refresh, I just wish it didn’t happen so quickly. Not everyone has broadband or good signals all the time, and a large percentage of his readers are in rural areas without access to fast connections, so I think it’s a serious issue he should address.

I love the dorks who call the content of Drudge ‘BS’ or claim he lacks integrity. All he is providing are links to other sites on the web. When you consider that he is linking to the AP, Reuters, the NYT, etc … maybe saying the content is BS may be correct,

Rob Schneider

The design has very little to do with Drudge’s success. Drudge’s success comes from the notion that he picks important stories to link to. He could have a design like, say, The Huffington Post, and his numbers would be the same or might even increase. It’s the content that drives the traffic, not this Microsoft Word layout that drives the traffic

And to say he doesn’t use a load of “tricks” is to refuse to acknowledge all the different ridiculous things he does color, photos, ALL CAPS, clip art sirens and multiple layering. There’s an awful lot of bad design in this design-free site.

And I don’t think it’s fair to call what Drudge does a news site. It’s a political spin site, not unlike RedState, DailyKos or other blogs. His job is to take things out of context, write headlines that aren’t true to the content of the story and make a political point with whatever Grade D celeb accidentally said about a GOP figure the night before.

The Drudge site does have style. Style in the same way “PC guy” has style as compared to the style of “Mac guy”.

The huge different between style and taste.

I think you are agreed with me.

<— This particular news junkie is radically liberal and loves Drudge. Whatever his politics may be, I find both sides on his site. I don’t understand why others can’t.

You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You are either a blog troll or a fucking idiot.

HEY GUYZ, I REACHED THE BOTTOM OF THIS FUCKING WEBSITE,

Your first mistake is when you keep referring to Drudge as a “news” site. It is no such thing. It is a propaganda site. Yes, Drudge will “take on” some big stories, but other big stories are conspicuously absent… the ones that hurt his political friends. That’s not news.

You’re a fucking idiot.

I sent a message to druge several years ago imploring him to never change the look and/or feel of his site. So many sites go for form over function and, one look at his stie, you know its all function. Bravo!

jease – turn some paging onto your comments… some of us like to grab the scroll bar instead of click the arrow (or use crappy laptop scroll)... usability guys come on!

jacob: the reason we call it BS is because it is selective choosing of which links he wants to build a (false) narrative, that then gets regurgitated in countless other places. He’s not just linking to other sites. There is (nefarious) purpose behind it.

If a website is getting the same look as 1997, then it probably has the same fucking people. If you’ve been somewhere 10,000 times, you’ll always go back even if you don’t want to.

Jeremy Mathews

I agree with some of your points, but you start off completely off base with this claim:

“The Drudge Report, on the other hand, has proven timeless. … It doesn’t look old and it doesn’t look new — it looks Drudge.”

As I read this, I thought, “What the hell is Mugsy talking about? It looks like one of those ugly early home pages from ‘96 or ‘97.” I had no idea when Drudge started, by the way. Well, lo and behold:

“It hasn’t changed since at least 1997, and I believe the design goes back even further. How many sites can survive — and thrive — unchanged for a decade? That’s special.”

It’s more inept than iconic. I mean, I give the man credit for choosing black-on-white (which has a newsy feel) rather than white-on-bright-green, and for designing something easily navigable with his less-than-outstanding coding skills, but I don’t think that makes the Report one of the best designed sites on the web.

The style worked for him and he kept it up, recognizing the allure of familiarity. More power to the man for being able to pull in a living working mostly alone while pimping weak news stories as the new big thing, but that doesn’t change the fact that his design sense is almost as bad as his journalism. If we are to judge the quality by generated income, then Beverly Hills Chihuahua would be an excellent film.

Thanks for the laugh. Are you saying that visually, we know he wants us to think that it’s newsworthy? Because if you’re saying that a Drudge siren denotes something that’s actually newsworthy, well… I’d be more than happy to debate that topic.

PS I for one do not read the Drudge Report, so I can’t explain why those who don’t like it read it. I am turned off by Drudge’s crap journalism and sense of news whenever I come in contact with his site. The collection of news may very well be invaluable, but I have never gotten to those links it because I find the page ugly to look at and Drudge’s sense of news even uglier. The man has never done anything to earn my respect, and so I have never come to consider him a news source. Obviously he has many readers who feel otherwise. Cory mentioned The Raw Story, the left’s attempt to emulate Drudge, and that’s another user experience that doesn’t work for me (for different reasons).

And now you guys have completely lost it.

i see that some of you have called the drudge report a gossip site and then praised huffington post whose current top stories include rosie odonnels fued with barbara walters and the fact that obama surprised biden with cupcakes for his birthday…hardly newsworthy. i realize that drudge is directed towards my intelligent right wing views but why cant liberals see when their precious news sites are biased and just as wrong (CNN, MSNBC). have your own opinions on politics but please try not to sound so ignorant when you voice your opinion

There are a lot of factors to why Drudge is successful, and the design is one of them. The design is beautiful in it’s own way and the OP spelled it out.

Fox News has the same politically-leaning, but is ugly as hell… it tries to copy the newsy website design and fails horribly.

NYTimes’s website on the other end of the political and design spectrum is beautiful as well, for the exact opposite reasons.

Most of everything else is exactly how the OP described. Take out the logotype and you wonder where you are.

Form follows function.

This grandmother LOVES the Drudge Report. I check Drudge daily, ever since just before he broke the Lewinsky story that Newsweek was too chicken to publish. I particularly appreciate links to European news sources. Seems to me that a lot of the bloggers here are envious of Drudge’s success, so they can’t simply acknowledge that the site is terrific. Over the years I’ve heard the Drudge report mentioned by politicians, by talk show hosts, by newspapers etc. Even Clinton referred to Drudge. The site has something for everybody: show biz, politics, gossip, natural disasters, storm tracking, all kinds of world events. What is there to complain about?

There was a time when Drudge had a radio talk show on Sunday night but, much to my chagrin, it was discontinued. Hurrah for Matt Drudge! He is unique and so is his web site.

Some people are NEVER going to give Drudge a compliment simply because he doesn’t solely provide the status quo liberal slant to every headline. Those people are obvious and offer ironic critiques about “content”.

That being said I once thought that drudge was plain…not so much “ugly”...however you quantify that…but I get so tired of the websites that clutter their pages with so much garbage as if they are competing for some sort of beauty pageant. That’s part of the problem with people today. If it ain’t pretty or if it doesn’t agree with the status quo then it CAN’T be legit. This is why they call us a dumb country. However in regards to the design…..PLEASE DONT CHANGE!!!!!!

One page: the latest truly BREAKING news, one column with links to all of the prominent pundits, another with links to all of the prominent international newspapers. Is there a more compact, efficient way to find out what’s going on in the world?

In assessing Drudge’s relevance, don’t overlook the fact that, for the last eight years, his rightwing cheerleading has been rewarded with exclusive scoops (read: leaks) from the Bush Administration that occasionally put him out in front of the pack. And it was quite entertaining to watch Drudge cherry-pick outlying polls in October trying to convince us (and himself) that McCain was closing in for the kill.

Now that Obama et al are running things, Drudge will be chasing the news instead of defining it.

Steve Nelson

Uggh I disagree. The Drudge Report ‘design’ is horrible. Just because it’s a successful business model doesn’t make the site a good design.

As a long time reader and as canadian news junkie,,, this site uses the kiss principal, with no fluff,,,,it works

I have to disagree. I am sight impaired and have to use a software program to read the web pages. I only get a few pages read when the page refreshes. At that point I’m lost and have to start over at some previously known point. Many times by the time I get to the point I left off, the page refreshes again. In frustration, I usually just close it and go to another news source. It is definitely not a friendly site for those of us that are seeing handicapped.

Even though the site is simple and functional and makes all of the user’s eyes dart around the screen. That last bit is what makes the Drudge site impossible for ADD suffers.

I cannot stand to actually visit his site, I have to read his site from an RSS reader so that I don’t give myself a migraine.

I can’t like the design for one reason: The guy that runs it is huge douche.

sandpiper759

DR is simple to use, try the msnbc site and avoid the videos. Simple fast links not only to the news but to the news sources. DR maybe biased, but DR shows you the link to the huffypost and all the lefts that have traffic. Looking for a newspaper site, go to DR first. Ask UPS if they need to change their brown trucks. New is not always better. It is also sad to see F * on any site. Respect is to be givin before it is received.

DRUDGE is the best source for news either online or in print!

Name me one other site that has that many links to every major syndicated columnist from the right and the left as well as every major news site regardless of their politics right there in front of you and easy to navigate. I must also say, It is very informative. If you frequent the site and read the stories a few times a day, you will be 1000% more informed than 99.9% of the general population. You forgot to mention how the links are green on christmas until you click the link then that link is green..THAT’S AWESOME!!!! Behind the scenes, drudge can actually run that site from his car and keep it up from anywhere. I heard once he had a mustang GT with a computer that he could keep it rolling and always up to date..the tech behind it is called mp3car…..anyways. Thanks Drudge for all the knowledge you send my way!

“The elitists on this page who cannot see the design of Drudge because of their own bias are morons who will never be successful.”

It was only a matter of time before those of us who don’t like Drudge’s design were labeled as “elitists.”

Very well put. I have gone away from Drudge as my home page a time or two, but always find myself back there. I just can’t seem to gleen as much from other sites as I can from Drudge. Very nice analysis on why it is so effective.

Blind much?? What many above fail to realize is that Drudge has easy access to almost EVERY major news site (even some more obscure ones) as well as links to a wide variety of bloggers, and gossip sites from right and left. The first link on my list is DR and then I navigate to BBC news, AP, CNN, FOX, or any other bloody site I please… it’s all right there! Why even bookmark another news site? Although I often find myself reading Drudges headlines as over 5 years I’ve found his to be the most relevant of the day. Thanks Drudge!

Does the design matter when the site itself is known mostly as a rightwing propaganda machine? Drudge is not news.

Richie Deegan

Stellar assessment, Jason…could not agree more. DRUDGE IS KING!

What seems to be rather broken is this site. In firefox, at least, this page (with all the comments) is so slow to scroll as to be unusable

Be sure to bookmark his pop’s site refdesk.com! There needs to be a Drudge forum.

heatherfeather

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid

Matt: I could KISS you ;-) Why wait for one of the other news sites to slooowly load all the celebrity links when I can get real news here. Kudos to links as to what Russia is doing. I like to keep an eye on those wily Russians!

I love Drudge! It’s my homepage and my newsource. I’ve disagreed with him at times, but I fundamentally agree with his vision.

Most of all, he has balls, and he brings me the news he knows that I want and need.

Well, except for the cloning…..........just kidding.

Hell, for the influence he weilds, he should be making 200 times the million he’s estimated to make. He should be making Rush Limbaugh or Oprah type of money.

Not to diminish it…....just saying Drudge is the best value in NEWS!

Drudge is for the toilet. Honestly. Here is my daily ritual. (sorry if this is too much info) I get home, kiss the Mrs., grab my laptop and head straight for the one place I (sometimes) get a few cherished moments of peace and quiet. Straight to Drudge I go, where I get caught up on all that has happened that day, maybe, if it is a slow news day I will check my email, but sometimes that has to wait because she again found me on my porcelain throne; for a second I was king of my castle. Hopefully, she will not read this because then I will be in trouble for writing a run-on sentence. Thanks for the 10 minutes of peace and quiet, and information Matt, keep up the good work.

sounds like a lot of you are trying to justify all the things you’ve worked hard to put on your resume… css, jquery, ajax, php, actionscript, flash…

Wow. I’m actually a little worried for our liberal brethren out there. Could it be that public education has deteriorated to such a degree? It’s been said before, but allow me to reiterate. Drugde links to OTHER SITES, people! Sure he picks which to link to, but IT”S HIS FREAKIN’ SITE! And most of the sites he links to are the mainstream media sites, like Salon.com or nytimes.com. Where’s the bias? You’re free to read the headline and then click on the link! Honestly, I think that critical thinking and liberal thought are mutually exclusive sometimes! He doesn’t claim to be unbiased, he doesn’t claim to be a news source, HE DOESN’T CLAIM TO BE ANYTHING! It’s a website with links! Click on ‘em if you want! Don’t if you don’t! Land sakes a-living, these people are FOOLS! Sorry to get worked up, but these people get on my nerves. As for the design argument, the Keep It Simple Stupid credo is a good thing to adhere to as a general principle. In writing, the more BS you spin the less people will understand and/or care about what you’re saying. You don’t have to use flowery rhetoric in news blurbs; save it for poems. But make the refresh every hour not every 5 mins. 2 penny’s.

The site is totally bias to conservatives and rarely if never posts any retractions to its ” Breaking News ” which normally turns out to be false. It does a great job of informing you if your only interested in hearing from one side. I like to hear the full story which tends to tell the truth more often and Drudge isn’t good for that…

It is very ugly, poorly designed… I think this post is a hoax…

Is and always will be my homepage (even before google). It’s the news.

Hmm… impressive some of the needless thrashing of Drudge. It really is a strange thing to watch how politics clouds a mind. Do I need to repeat this? Drudge only links to other sites. He sets the agenda, but he doesn’t even comment. Of course there’s a bias; the person choosing the links is just that: one person. But if you’ve got some queer idea that some other news source isn’t biased, you’re living in the shadows my friend. Bias in news isn’t the problem. Don’t kid yourselves; there has loooooooong been bias in news. The problem is the readership not understand that there is bias in news and accepting it as gospel without suspicion.

Something that few in this comment thread seem to understand is that Drudge’s power isn’t necessarily in his laymen readers: it’s in his media industry readers. It’s been said over and over that nearly every worthwhile journalist checks his page at least a few times a day. He sets to the news agenda for the day. Check his page in the morning, you’ll see the same stuff later on CNN or FOX.

One of the bonuses to Drudge IS that he forces his visitors to read a diversity of news and commentary. He obviously has a worldview through which his links are filtered, but hasn’t yet limited himself to posting only those news story which bolster his opinion.

I don’t see how anyone can say this site isn’t news when it is a bunch of links to news stories. anyone that says its a rightwing propaganda machine has never actually read DR. Go get your tingly feelings with Chris Mathews, the rest of us know where the real news is at!

what about the hilarious headlines??? Drudge’s ineffable sense of humor applied to his uncanny ability to read trends!!!! drudge is going to need secret service with this new clinton administration… oh wait, obama administration. God bless drudge. i want him back on the radio!!! and he gives you just the right amount of entertainment news, his own interests that shine through, always the first with breaking madonna news too! i mean who else is like that???

Although I agree with most of your points, there’s one important factor that this site lacks that keeps it from being well designed.

There is no flow.

A good design will attract the viewer’s eye to the focal point (in this case, the headline) and then guide them to the rest of the design.

The Drudge Report does not do this.

For starters, when I load the page, I only see the ad at the top. I have to scroll down to see the headline. This is bad: a good design should not make me search for what I want.

After I see the headline, my eye travels down to the content, but I don’t know where to go from there. There’s no distinguishing elements – just a confusing, jumbled mess. Saying that it “encourages wandering and random discovery” is like calling a bank robber a “wealth redistributor.”

“To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose”

Doesn’t that qualify as “utility” and not design?

Tyler Payne

Aaaand this article is officially ON THE DRUDGE REPORT. Left column. Congratulations.

OK, you convinced me. I argued with the headline but all of the points were good. But this drives me up the wall:

It’s generic list of links, black and white monospaced font, and ALL CAPS headlines have survived every trend

The possessive of “it” is “its” WITHOUT AN APOSTROPHE! The apostrophe makes it a contraction; you have said “It is generic list of links….”

My posting here is yet another example of what your article talks about. Yes! I went to Drudge and his link brought me here.

Very good write up on a topic that we all usually just take for granted.

I agree with a few others who would welcome an RSS feed for the site.

If you use the Adblock and Auto-Refresh blocker add-ons for Firefox the site is quite nice and loads even faster without having to wait for that first obnoxious banner to load. Unfortunately, I’m forced to use IE at when at work and it’s an eyesore.

Right now, Drudge has a red link to a story about the new G&R album right above a pic of Buffett with bitter beer face. Classic.

Joe Brownbag

Re – Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web

I enjoy reading Drudge, but wish it were more viewer friendly for me. I noticed them bragging up on all the many hits which they were getting and had to wonder if every time the page reloaded (like every 50 seconds) if that counted as a new hit each time it happened. If yes – and if the constant annoying reloading is happening to others – that would add up to a whole lot of false hits. I hope this practice is not a deliberate act on Drudges part just to falsely pad their hit count. If it is – How freaking Washington of them.

It never even occurred to me to consider it ugly or pretty… but it’s easy. Simple, easy, fast, sensational. Those are popular things. Like the very plain NY Post, which has always has higher circulation than the others, you get a quick look at the top stories, including ones that are potentially inflamatory or embarrassing to our corporate overlords and their New Age OneWorld Brotherhood of Man ideology that’s constantly going to pieces.

Well, I’ve never really read Drudge Report, so I checked it up yesterday after John Gruber linked to this post. I have nothing against ugly sites, but for a newcomer Drudge is just hard to use. I mean it’s very hard to see what is what, there is very, very little hierarchy there, no structure. I just stared at the page wondering WTF.

I think one could design a much more clear and usable, text-only, one-page headline collections. But as I say, this is only a first impression. Based on that, I wouldn’t call this site well designed.

clayusmcret

It is the site to go to, that’s for sure. My one and only complaint about the site, and it’s been the same one for years is that about the time I get 3/4 – 4/5 done reading through the headlines the daggone page refreshes. I’d give your right arm to slow that down because after the refresh the reader has to start over (even if only scanning) to make sure he/she didn’t miss anything new. It’s not that I read slow but am constantly querying myself with “Interested? Care about that one? Want to check it out? Yes/No?” Almost done and REFRESH. Damn! :-)

So Drudge is a right-wing fanatic??? Only the moonbats would think such.

How is Drudge any different than a classic newpaper layout, other than having to click the headline to get the story? Name me a newspaper that doesn’t have a political bias.

It works because the basic style has worked for centuries.

My favorite Drudge headline!

Kevin Carroll

I’ve been going to Drudge on a daily basis for years. It is a perfect design, a lot easier to scan over than some of the traditional sites mentioned in other comments. I even click an ad as a thanks to Matt on occasion.

Seriously, there must be a subliminal message there that says you like this site… Because it’s ugly as hell…

I have been going to Drudge since the time he had maybe a million hits a day. This is what a newspaper should be, smatherings of news from all over the country and the world. It is simple, straightforward and you don’t have to remember how to search the site. I don’t understand why so many think he’s so horrid. All newspapers have an editorial board, he’s his own editorial board of one. I have always found that there is an amazing lack of world news on American newspapers and love the links that go to newspapers all over the world. This is the one site that you can go and then check everyone out. It is my homepage and can not imagine not going to Drudge multiple times a day.

works for me. plus it is nonjudgemental. simplicity is the key.

Function, not form. Utilitarian. That’s Matt’s site in a nutshell.

I agree, it ain’t pretty. The fonts are old school … like an old fashioned typewriter, serifs and all. But there’s no disputing it, it’s the first page I check in the morning and the last page before I pack it in for bedtime.

I use a Mac, and Safari as a browser. My favorite sites are listed alphabetically left to right—all except for that one space smack dab in in the middle, which is in all caps: DRUDGE.

When I travel internationally, and have very little time in which check what’s happening in the world, it’s Matt’s page I go to first.

Jason, as others have said: you nailed it!

Some ok points – but the author is confused about what “design” actually is.

The sections: Breaking news is breaking news, One guy can run it, No news is the news, It’s cheap to maintain etc have absolutely nothing to do with design.

Clearly content (or links to content) is the driving force behind the site and why is is so popular. Not this perceived “genius” design.

There’s a reason why The Drudge Report is my homepage, and why I always click No when a browser or program asks me if I want to set my homepage to msn, microsoft, yahoo, or google.

Victor Barney

My only problem with the Drudge Report is that it keeps refreshing itself and I lose what I’m reading, etc.

“Clearly content (or links to content) is the driving force behind the site and why is is so popular. Not this perceived “genius” design.”

I don’t know Jimmee, I beg to differ. I can find content (the same content) on other sites, but I can’t find it as quickly.

The sight ‘design’ (I know you don’t want to think of it as being planned) lends to a quick no messing around give me the headlines way of doing business.

The design is a big part of why it’s so successful. Yahoo and Google and any other news site have the same news stories or links to the content but it’s not designed in a way as to make it easy to find.

Matt is a genius because he understands that newer and higher technology isn’t always better; sometimes simpler is better.

Years ago, I decided to emulate exactly the format of The Drudge Report (www.orcaplex.com). I remember it being much more difficult than I had estimated. But it’s my all-time favorite for elegant simplicity and mash-up.

“and right now it is the only place on the web to find unbiased truth”

I just spit coffee all over my iMac!

This post basically pisses all over people, talented designers, information architects, that labour long and hard not only to create good designs for their users but also compelling content. Drudge, a dickhead in a stupid hat and nothing more, has created a link farm, a crap link farm.

It makes money! big deal, so does the mafia. what’s next, “the mob and the perfect business plan”, grow up!

Been my homepage since Monica. Nothing beats it.

Well, again, I think its counterpart HINESSIGHT has a much cleaner look, is more informative and seems to get the right stuff on at the right time. http://www.hinessight.com

Great write-up. The Drudge Report has been my homepage almost from the beginning. It follows the KISS rule perfectly. Keep It Simple Stupid.

The reasons Drudge has a short refresh rate is:

1) To give you a sense of urgency while reading the page.

2) To generate more ad views.

3) To keep the page current.

The proper way to reach The Drudge Report is to right click each interesting link and select “View in New Tab” until you have selected all the interesting stories.

It’s impeccably functional; loads fast, logically formatted and, contrary to what the leftists say, is politically balanced. Where else can you find links to virtually all the major columnists, no matter what their political slant? I use it most every day, even when I’m traveling in China.

Why is Google number one? Simplicity. Search and only search.

Drudge is similar—a singular focus on the site’s purpose, with no distracting bells or whistles.

Experiment 626

It looks like a Newspaper.

Personally my favorite part of the Drudge is when he posts unflattering pictures of politicians… I don’t know how many ugly pictures of Hillary, Pelosi, Bush, Obama and today Warren Buffet I have seen…. it’s great and it’s easy to navigate… I am a firm believer of it it ain’t broke then don’t fix it….

Drudge has usability. Navigation is simple. Fast loading. Easy to find. It has access to all kinds of views.

Don’t change it.

Emma makes a great point:

“It makes money! big deal, so does the mafia.”

There are a lot of posts on here to the effect of “it makes money, so it must be designed well, or he must be doing something right.”

I admittedly tend to think this way also.

But profitability doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with good products, good business plan, or good anything. There are plenty of companies out there and make a killing by being the total opposite.

This post is about whether or not Drudge is one of the “best designed sites” on the web. And the answer to this question is a very simple “no.”

Balls? Come on, this site is propaganda and sucks and for every “breaking news” (with no link to verify usually which means it’s merely a rumor, not news) there are hundreds of links to stories in rags that are hardly news worthy; not to mention the majority of “headlines” used by Drudge are purely PR and often distort the source story or have no relation to the source story – so stop exaggerating. As you say no news is news – really? Not. It ain’t breaking if someone else already broke it, wrote it up, photographed it, etc.

As for his maintenance team and costs – pure speculation on your part – how about some facts, an interview with Drudge or something, some financials to back up your claims. Just because the design is simple doesn’t mean it’s cheap.

And you claim the design has been around since before 1997? Where? What web site was relevant before 1997? Netscape? A few others?

Then there is the bias, the propaganda, the complete nonsensical posts which are abundant.

One can’t deny his traffic numbers however and the only question that remains is that if his design and strategy are so good (and many believe a new form of ‘news’ delivery as newspapers die a slow death), will he have to adapt and change as many of his sources disappear? How will dying companies like the NYT and others leverage a Drudge like approach to survive or be born again? Offline news is dwindling. Television news has lost its objectivity (Drudge never had any but that’s not the point) and so online news is the future – the blogs or whatever name they take on next.

The one apparent difference – Drudge seems to be like the Islamic jihad – he isn’t in it for the money and has always had time on his side. He doesn’t care how long it takes to achieve whatever his goal is, he just keeps at it.

I think the old marketing axiom can also apply to web design… KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID.

I’m a designer and would love the world to appreciate websites on artistic measures but the world doesn’t. The truth is, as is the case with commercial design, the emphasis is on the purpose of the message. The Drudge Report sets up itself as the online equivalent of the newspaper daily scoop and it looks depicts that instantaneously. Brevity is the soul of wit and Mr. Drudge is quite witty with his choice of jumbo font sizes for breaking news and use of imagery to immediately attract viewers to certain headlines.

His web page style takes the shortest time of all websites to say exactly what it is. “DRUDGE HAS NEWS!”

Slick move. You ‘made’ the Drudge report by complimenting Drudge’s report style. See http://www.doomedreport.com

All your points are valid, except non of them define ‘DESIGN’. If you submitted this site as one of your creative projects in school you would surely get an ‘F’.

When Drudge composed this site a decade ago I surely bet he wasn’t thinking about design.

Because it loads fast, visited by millions, and has immediate fresh content, and people depend on it like morning coffee doesn’t mean its a good design. It just means it WORKS.

@Bemused: Google is number one because they made a better search engine FIRST.

Then they followed up their search engine with some of the coolest applications on the planet…most of which are free.

Their success cannot be pinned to “simple, uncluttered homepage.” And I think it’s ridiculous to put the Drudge in this category in the first place. It’s NOT simple to use…it’s NOT uncluttered…it’s a f**king mess. If you haven’t used it every day for the last 45 years, you don’t know what to do.

Chuck Coughlin

Humility is the most valuable asset for excellence in every aspect of IT. Though now rare it used to be common when I began in IT in 1966.

Drudge has it and he delivers function rather than self.

I like Drudge Report every morning, but wish they would not ‘refresh’ automatically everytime I get to the bottom of the right column.

Function, not fashion. At the end of the day, that’s all the Drudge is. Work obligations tend to take up a majority of the day; however, the Drudge is always there, ready to keep me informed of events occurring beyond the walls of my cubicle. Fantastic write-up – critics will have a hard time drudging up any dirt. Keep the articles coming!

“Its” (no apostrophe) is used to convey ownership by a non-personal pronouns, as in “ Its generic list of links. . ..”

K in Denver

CJ CURTIS: “If you haven’t used it every day for the last 45 years, you don’t know what to do.”

Are you kidding?? All you have to do is click the links. Any dummy can figure tht out. Every headline and news article that you want to read is on Drudge. I hate other news outlets sites. Stuff everywhere and too hard to find the important stories. Drudge has everything at your fingertips. I read it every day…twice!

I find this all very interesting. It seems that most of the people posting to this think that the site is “Ugly, Disorganized, Biased, and Not well thought out”. But, ONE thing stands out the most, EVERYBODY knows about the site!!! @ András Puiz: If the site is SO HORRIBLE why do you keep going back?

To ALL of you that have posted about “Design” I guess that if it is not all FLASH and FANCY crap then it is not a good design? I have a site that I was asked to fix just one part of it (missing picture in a flash program) and because the company that did the site originally used SO MUCH FLASH that everything on the page was locked and could not be worked on, I had to rebuild the page from scratch. This page took over 30 seconds to load because of all the FLASH CRAP that was built into it. Was this a good “Design”? NO, But the company that built it thought it was because it was flashy and fun to watch(his web count was way down until I redid the page) Matt is usually very good at keeping up to date with what is current and relevant, and NOT biased as to what he puts on the site. All in all I think that the people who are slamming him for the sites looks need to get a life and go back to their Air America buddy Franken and leave us real people alone.

ALSO you don’t get VOTED as one of the best sites by ALL the major Web and Computer magazines and sites if your not doing something right.

Awsome details and right on guys!!!! Great story and YOU hit the nail on the head!!!

Although I am a graphic designer, I am not too well versed in the intricacies and theories of web design. I will say though, that I do make a few trip daily to Drudge, because I find what I’m looking for quickly. It is clean, simple, and direct. It is effective in getting it’s point across, and isn’t that one of the main goals of a good design?

This would certainly not work for many areas, be it web or print, but in this case it works well. Good article!

Drudge is the best. News is current and not days old such is presented by TV and Radio.

Linking directly to the source of the news keeps it current. Many times I’ve watched the evening news and they have messed the story up and did not give the true story.

Keep it up Matt!

Hey I like the site, but it is UGLY! Not in an anti aesthetic way, just real Ugly.

Don’t argue with me, I know more than you. After all, I have a Master’s degree in Art!

Ugly site – Good content.

Every time you click on a link, it replaces the current screen. In other words, he doesn’t open a new window for clicked links. This probably creates more views for him because when you go back to Drudge to see what else is there he gets another view. Is this correct?

I’d be willing to bet that most of the people that say Drudge is a poor designed site are web designer geeks that want to justify there jobs and salaries. If I want a quick synopsis of what is going on in the world, I go to Drudge, because it is fast, and it is actually laid out intuitively. It is the old “form or function” debate. Give me function any day. I drive an old beat up pickup truck because it is reliable and does what I need it to do. Is it pretty? Hell no, but who gives a damn? Give me Drudge over ESPN any day. I like the content on ESPN, but I have a hell of a time finding what I want, not to mention the damn ads that ghost on top of the page and the videos that play without me asking.

Brilliant. You brought things to my attention that I hadn’t considered about Drudge’s site even though I visit the site dozens of times every day. Excellent analysis and I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Michael Miller

I agree with the basic premise of the article that the Drudge Report, as aesthetically pleasing as the website is not; certainly has one of the more functional layouts for its main page. As a designer the site is as ugly as ugly gets, but I am also the type of designer that believes in not only good visual design, but user friendly design as well. The Drudge Report provides quick access to fresh news stories and is great for that. It doesn’t include tons of slow flash, bloated navigation, banners or overbearing ads that get in the way of the content.

My one disagreement with the Drudge Report being easy to use is the one element that seems to have been either forgotten or neglected in this article, the archive area that you can get to by the hard to locate Recent Drudge Headlines link on the lower right of the front page. The site is truly not a ‘one page’ site, and maybe I am the only one out there that does this, but when I get home I like to share cools news stories with my wife. Usually, by that time, the story is no longer available on the main page due to the quick cycle of information. That requires me to visit the archive area, which quite frankly is the most difficult to use archive I have ever seen, repeats the same headline over and over, and sometimes makes it impossible to locate anything of value. Many times I have been unable to find a story that was on the main page only hours before in order to share that information with someone else. Though the site makes finding the freshest news stories quick and easy, it does not bode well for return visits to find the same information later. Maybe others can retain all that in memory, but mine isn’t that great, so a site that can’t provide easy access to all the information it has (and not only the most recent of the information) isn’t likely to bode as one of the best designed sites for me. Call me weird I suppose.

Been using DRUDGE report since it started. Its excellent, no advanced features that sap resources and bandwidth. Most other sites have added plenty of useless eye-candy. DRUDGE will still work on a dial up, which most of the world still has. It works on all browsers that I have tried, in 98se/xp/vista, OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Mandiva Linux. I wish more sites were like it. Most have been ruined by “Improvements” and useless updates that just use up bandwidth.

DrudgeIsSatan

The only reason this person decided to write about Drudge is because he’s familar with Drudges overinflated ego. Any mention of him on the web garners you an exclusive link to the site. WHO CARES!

This is hilarious, reminds me of the whole “ bad design is better/more effective than good design debate.

The author (wrongly) perceives Drudge’s popularity as some sort of testament to the - ahem - effectiveness of his website’s design. If you were to take the argument further, you might suppose that Internet Explorer 6 was the best designed browser. The real reason Drudge is popular, and followed, is not because of his design, but in spite of it. It does (contrary to others’ comments) have everything to do with political bias, and the fact that’s it’s reached the sort of popularity that’s easy to ride out. Let’s not be mistaken that many a popular celebrity are not worth looking up to as role models.

I hasten to assume that the same folks applauding 37 signals for their groundbreaking viewpoint are some of the same ones who jumped on board the whole gradient and round corners trend of a few years back. Is this generation of (web) designers really so spineless and short-sighted?

However, I applaud the 37 signals crew for finding yet another (waste of time) topic that stirs up some nice comment wars, but ultimately says nothing. Matt Drudge would be proud.

Well Designed

I think it’s pretty clear by now that you don’t understand the definition of ‘design’. So kindly stfu

Michael Miller: Drudge does not own, operate, or have any connection with the archive site. He just links to it.

I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t have all the extra junk.. Because of that its footprint is small (disk space wise) and therefore it loads fast. When I visit a news site I care about information, now how pretty it looks.

It’s a fact of nature! If you have to “scream” at someone to gain their attention, then you really have nothing to offer. I think advertising has “screamed” too long and the audience has turned away since the audience sees that in most cases “it has nothing to offer”. Drudge is real and he has something to offer that’s real.

In nature, usually the best “mate” is someone who is “themselves” rather than trying to be someone who they aren’t.

Drudge is the first place I go in the morning and throughout the day. It’s no nonense news and I appreciate it.

Mike W – I am not trying to start arguments, just providing my point of view as a user. As a user who visits a site I am not concerned over who owns what and links to what. All I care about is ease of use for me. All I know is the archive is hard to use and I have seen many that are far better. As a website operater, if I was linking to an awful utility I would think of finding a better one, that would have ‘good design’ rather than continuing to link to one that does very little for the site users.

I am all for something being as user friendly as possible, which is why, despite the ugly look, the main page is great. I just saw a reference above to ESPN’s site as a bad example and it is a perfect bad example of a bloated layout that makes getting news slow and cumbersome. The reality is, whether linked to or not, the archive is cumbersome and would serve the user better if it functioned in some other way than it currently does.

CowboyLifer

Bravo … on target … point on! My first (not my only) stop daily.

I continue to come to the Drudge Report to get links to important news as it develops. I don’t have time to wait for some insipidly pretentious website to open that’s all goobered up with slow loading Flash movies and cleverly hidden headlines and adverts for noodle enhancers. I also don’t have to depend on the politics of the editor to see a link to a timely story and be left wondering what wasn’t there that should have been. Because of the links taking me to a story I can scan the page rapidly to find what interests me rather than fighting my way through pages of blather.

Eric Schwartzman

Clearly information architecture outweigh aesthetics, yet most organizations still value “good looking” site design over usability. Many people think Craigslist is ugly , but it still generates millions of dollars in revenue.

Gerald Weber

This bring up the point sometimes simple is better.

K in Denver:

Nope. Not kidding. And what I mean by that…

Right now, there are over 50 links down the middle column identified only by first and last name. Down the left column are over 100 links to other news sources (ABC, USA Today and so on). The rest of the links are scattered about with no rhyme or reason.

So I think for the vast majority of people that come across this site for the first time TODAY…they would experience a truly WTF? moment.

I find this whole conversation incredibly ironic anyway, given the fact that all the news outlets that are so “diluted” or “overly complex” are the ones that actually PRODUCE the news that he is selling.

Anyone with the time and inclination could produce this site. ANYONE. Yet since this happens to be the most popular one, he is heralded as a design genius and usability marvel. WHAT A JOKE.

Another thing I like about Drudge: I have yet to ever notice a typo on his site.

For folks who think Drudge is an idealogue, take a good look at his headlines for a week, and also at the commentators that he links to. Ann Coulter? check. Maureen Dowd? ALSO check. For every Rush Limbaugh link, there’s a Frank Rich link. He uses Newsmax stories but also NY Times, WaPo and AP; any news source that breaks a story is eligible for a Drudge link.

Drudge was the first site to have the “Dick Cheney indicted” article. There were quite a few Republicans who thought Drudge was anti-McCain. I think people get confused because he just presents the news. He doesn’t comment on it. In a day when most news stories have quite a bit of spin in them, it can seem slanted to some folks when you see articles from different perspectives.

Last point – Drudge shapes the conversation. Try tracking the time between articles appearing on Drudge, and their appearance on other news outlets. He’s not following, he’s generally a day or two ahead of the CNN’s and Foxes of the world.

Drudge has a perfect layout to get caught on the news of the day along with links to almost every publication/columnist that matters.

ESPN = terrible layout

Fuck Drudge and his gay ass website.

Yes, he puts a lot of things together in one convenient place. BUT, the constant refreshing of the the page, before I can even finish one scan through the headlines, is a major annoyance which occurs on no other site I look at. I’m deleting my Drudge bookmark right now.

Lot of disgust for either aesthetics or Matt Drudge himself…

... but really, can you argue with success?!

Drudge’s site (layout and content/links to content) is probably right behind Google in terms of use… and that can’t happen if there’s something wrong about it. It’s style is it’s own, instantly familiar, EXTREMELY user-friendly, no surprises/pop-ups/hiddenpages/confusing menus…

Like a plain navy blazer, a a simple white t-shirt or a pair of Chuck Taylor Converse lace-ups, it’s simplicity is it’s genius… you cannot argue with success!

Anyone that gets their news from a recluse homosexual, pedophile Jew like Drudge should have their head examined.

I’ll respectfully disagree with you. While I agree that the content is placed in an accessible form, it lacks proper separation. It’s extremely hard to discern one element from the next and makes browsing a strain and frustrating.

Being unique does not make you useful; and there are several other arguments that have no relevance to the site’s design. Some very minor work could make the site 100% better with little to no overhead.

It is pretty fast though.

I have forever been a fan of Clean Fast-Loading Pages. I wish the news sources that Drudge links to… were as fast loading as his page is. No pop ups… or razzle dazzle that slows down my time on the net. great job.

AMEN (to Jason’s post, lest people think I’m saying AMEN to “Dave,” the most recent commenter, who should calm down)

Drudge is too busy sucking cock to work on his websites design.

Agree – Drudge has been home page for a decade at least…(well, alternating with google).

Amazing how some opinions here seem to be based on ideology rather than actual content or the article.

Drudge does what he does – and doesn’t hide the headlines that our “sensitive lib/socialist friends” get so upset about. (aka Kevin).

remember our Liberal Motto: “Diversity in all things…. EXCEPT thought” :)

It isn’t ugly or pretty, it’s neither. It’s words and pictures on a page. I have no idea why it’s being called out as well designed or not. The site is an utilitarian item, like a dust rag. What’s great about the site is the headline and link writing. It’s like the Enquirer without flashy graphics and colors. It draws readers in for that reason alone, not for its design or lack of design. Seems to me that some feel a need to call it out as one or another but neither is why the site works.

CJ, do you work in the Dinosaur Media, a failing newspaper perhaps? You seem to have some resentments boiling under your skin against Drudge. Calm down!

Because millions more go to Drudge than the content providers’ sites is not a fair knock against Drudge. The reason people go to Drudge is that we’re busy. Because of him, we don’t have to sift through all the news sites’ endless content and distracting “well-designed” sites. His listing of newspapers and columnists says “come to me” if you want to find a paper or pundit. Most people can figure that out pretty quickly…notwithstanding an initial WTF reaction.

Drudge is a filter, collater and a time-saver, and his design remains laser focused on that purpose.

Whether anyone agrees with his news judgement (what he chooses to highlight/link), he is a force. Just as the editors of the New York Times used to strongly influence the content of the 3 nightly news shows by the stories it chose to print on the front page each morning, Drudge now strongly influences the 24/7 cable news cycle.

I agree with you that anyone can do what he does. But he leads because he figured it out first, and hasn’t lost his focus. He was the first mover and his purpose (time-saving) has become even more important as more and more content-providing websites proliferate. We need shortcuts like his now more than ever!

miamiwebdesign

In the end, what matters is traffic. And if people keep coming back to a website, it is doing its job!

Love the writeup. Think you hit 95% of it dead on.

MattD and Ted allude to something I think is the reason his site still generates the draw. He has the inane ability to sense which topics are relevant to the majority of people.

I saw a study on media bias that has CNN and CBS in the 30’s, and FoxNews in the 60’s (1-100, with 50 being completely moderate). Drudge was around 50. It doesn’t matter if it’s political, or child down the well, he seems to understand it’s relevance and promotes it.

Google tried to replicate this with their Google News experiment, but they don’t realize that when it comes to news, people seem to want some filtering or context.

I’d love to see how he identifies the hot stories. His page may not have changed, but he must be using some tools to find stuff online.

Michael 20 Nov 08 —I think you fear ideas other than your own. That fact is Drudge is successful and you are not.

The term ‘Design’ in its purist sense implies utility; the traffic numbers trump all other arguments.

What a laugh – all these intense fellow travelers grousing about style when what they really don’t appreciate is any site that occaionally directs their attention to others that offend their left wing sensibilities. So many suffering from that stupidity is why our survival as a free and independent nation with responsible citizens is unlikely.

I am one of those guys that’s one his site about 12 or so times a day. I’m addicted to it…

but the thing a REALLY HATE about the site is that it constantly reloads itself while your in the middle of reading a headline. That just drives me crazy. He could at at least set it to reposition the user to the spot on the page he was previously , or just have the reloading set as an option to be turned off by the user.

He also puts up new headlines that do not link to the article for quite some time. They just link back to the homepage.

Other than that. Its I love the site.

Aaron Irizarry

I feel about the drudge site like i feel about the ugly dog at the pet adoption center… someone has to love it.. and that ugly dog could bring value to someones life….

I am just glad that someone is not me.

Some interesting points about layout, design, load times and usability. Good discussion going on.

but lets all be honest here… if he wasn’t who he is…. this discussion would be a lot different.

From the nice square ad at the top of the page… to the gifted logo, and left aligning “does this mean it’s to late” down to the jammed packed stuffed in and cluttered new, ads, and lists of links… what is not to love about this site?

everything is not to love.

Lots of haters on here. Some folks who said they’ve never seen a retraction: name a story he posted that turned out to need a retraction.

There are folks on here who admit they’ve never read Drudge, and then tell us that his stories are slanted. What are you, psychic? Omniscient? Tell me how his link to the GnR album debut fits with the right-wing agenda, please. Did you know that the Chinese Democracy’s launch was being held on MySpace? That darned Salon link is just to right-wing for some folks, I guess.

Then there’s folks who say Drudge picks and chooses stories to suit his agenda. Name a story that he’s skipped. No really, just name 1.

Bottom line, I’m sure tons of “liberal” sites rely on Drudge for a majority of their new referrals. NYTimes should thank there stars that Drudge sends millions of users there way.

Matt Drudge is the Rush Limbaugh of the internet.

I think this assessment is spot on. However, the only thing, in my mind, that keeps Drudge from being considered one of the truly best sites ever is his total lack of impartiality. His thinly veiled, unabashed presentation of predominantly right-wing leaning news stories undermines his true potential for greatness.

Just imagine what the DR could become if he actually adopted more than just the superficial look of an old newspaper and newsman? You know, just the facts, balanced coverage…no editorializing. Now THAT would be a truly great achievement!

Sparkenickle

Hi Matt. I know you read all the comments about yourself.

Toot your own horn much? Of course you would say that, but the fact of the matter is that no one else has said that. The Huffington Post is by far a much better designed site. And much better in terms of their point of view. You lose Mr Drudge, sir.

I agree!! I like the design too simple easy and clean. I hate clutter automatic video I dont want to hear or see just give the news baby. If i am looking for entertainment I will find it, i dont need it dont want it when I am looking for the news. Besides drudge is nice because i know it is always work friendly with the lack of noise. (note the videos are why i hate the big three sites for their shows and ESPN).

Matt Drudge is a self hating jew. His mother and father must be ashamed that he has turned his back on the jewish community.

It would be a MUCH better site if that pointless auto-refresh would go away. What a PITA to have the site reload while I’m halfway through reading it on my phone.

idrudgereport.com FTW

I am a young person that likes to get his information from many places and then makes up his own mind about a story. I do this because media bias is everywhere (right and left). I found the Drudge Report a few years back, and am a daily visitor ever since. I am a visitor because I find alot of stories there that get buried by editors of other news agencies for various reasons. I consider the design easy and straightfoward. Keep up the good work Drudge!

so dr is whatever you need it to be. it’s biased! it’s the only true source of news! it’s great design! it’s crap design!

1. for those claiming it’s not biased because all he does is link to other sites: just stop. you know that the way he writes a headline, what he decides to link to, which point he highlights, are all products of bias. all editorial decisions include some degree of bias.

2. for those claiming that he’s the only source for real news, as opposed to the liberal mainstream media: um, i just hope that you’re not the same people arguing that it’s not biased because all he does is link to other news sites. cuz, you know, that would be ridiculous. either the msm is liberal, elite, biased, evil, etc. or it’s good reliable journalism and drudge is credible because the msm is credible.

3. for those claiming drudge is doing what the msm wishes they could do, or what they used to do, or “real” journalism: again, let’s go back to the fact that his headlines are links, often to msm sites. so any “journalism” is actually done by other organizations, like the liberal-biased nyt or pbs or whatever. drudge is… what, a parasite?

i’m not sure anyone still cares at this point, but can we make up our minds about what he actually does?

Very true! Drudge is so influential that he determines the news of the day. I worked for a national radio host and every morning we would look up Drudge and highlight stories for my boss to talk about on the air to millions of people. If it wasn’t on Drudge, my boss probably didn’t broadcast it.

I love Drudge, it has been my homepage for over 10 years. It’s great because (to quote John Madden,) “BOOM! It’s all there.” I can get the news and the columnists who I agree with and those I don’t. Newswires, major papers, the whole works…without annoying pop-ups.

Jew? Pedofile? Homosexual? F—- Drudge?

It is becoming very clear as you read comment sections these days that the Bush haters may have hated Bush for sure, but they hated first. Now that Bush is basically gone they need to spew that hate somewhere else, and more specifically onto someone else. Does it make you feel better somehow?

What pathetic lives these people must live. Join the Peace Corps or something and find a purpose in life beyond wallowing in your hate-filled misery!

Interesting analysis. What I find interesting is how some people intend to turn this into a political discussion rather than a look at the design and functional merits of the website. People…separate your emotional reactions from your logical and professional judgment!

Auto refresh sucks. I visit several online news sites every day and Drudge seems to be the only one that uses auto refresh. I am on a dial up and get about half way thru the front page and then “Bam” it auto refreshes and I have to wait for it to down load again. Does Drudge update his site every thirty seconds or am I missing something. I know I should have high speed but it just won’t work in my situatuion. I guess I will just have to stick with WND where I think he gets most of his news anyhow.

I agree! It’s a pleasure to take 10 minutes and get what I need to read like a fast food buffet.

Also, I was always thought that the” RED” type was for stories broke by the Drudge staff.

Am I wrong?

Keep up the wonderful stuff.

Matt Drudge is a Jew and a Homosexual. The Pedophile comment was based on an “assumption” like a lot of the bullshit gossip he picks out for you to read.

If you don’t believe me, look for yourself…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Drudge

The only thing I don’t like about it is the refresh rate of the page. ...Type your response to this post slowly… I don’t read too quick…hehehehe Does anyone know how to turn that off!

What I do is far removed from anything “journalistic.”

The thing that “boils under my skin” is how people can take a successful site or business and somehow attribute that success to a “deeper understanding” or some sort of “design genius.”

The Drudge Report is just like any other news site in a lot of ways. The way in which it delivers it’s content is very different from most others. It’s been around a long time. Its incredibly popular, I’m sure for many reasons. Therein lies its success.

He has taken design out of the equation. This is one of those sites where people LOOK PAST its ugliness because they like the headlines that it delivers. If that were not the case, he would just be another guy that produced a site that noone wants to read. Design, good or bad, would count for nothing.

Now, if you define his “design” in terms of the news he chooses to provide, then I can appreciate that. Just don’t define it in terms of usability or simplicity, or “timeless design.”

I read Drudge every day. He finds the breaking stories and everybody else in the mainstream media follows shortly afterwards. It’s a herd mentality and whether they admit it or not, he is their leader. The site is designed perfectly for that purpose.

my all time fav:

www.toddpnyc.com

same aesthetic as drudge in some ways.

The beauty of the Drudge report is in its simplicity. I’m glad you noticed~

I like the design for many of the reasons Jason laid out. For me, it has the feel of an actual newspaper where I can easily scan around for what tempts me.

He doesn’t use a lot of ads nor does he have all the flashy design features which are often a distraction and an unnecessary burden on download time.

The titles of the links are often made up by Matt and won’t be found in the article itself… part of the brilliance although I could see how it may annoy lefties since they are often partisan in nature.

The use of white space and just enough pictures amongst the three columns of links is sheer brilliance in my opinion. I don’t understand how anyone finds it cluttered or hard to read. I find it very easy to scan, ignoring what I find boring, so I can get to what I really want to read.

The like the fact that he includes stories like the Monkey-Man scare in India and the Somali Pirates run amok. They have that TV episode kind of feel where you find yourself asking “Hey, I wonder if anyone fell off a roof today in India because they saw the Monkey-Man?” or “How many ships did those rascally Pirates hijack today?” Sometimes those ongoing story lines are campy and sometimes they have serious implications, but for me anyway, they always have me coming back for more.

I am software engineer by trade and I have done some website design although I am no expert. I find the design of the Drudge Report unique, easy to use, and devoid of the useless, pretty gadgets that career website designers overuse. I agree with the person that brought up ESPN. That website is so busy yet so useless in terms of readability. They should seriously fire whoever designed that crap. Every time that “make it better”, it makes it harder to find any real content.

Cancer, Nice name!

So Drudge is a Jew and a homosexual—and Wikipedia even says so, so it must be true. And your point is? Is that a two-fer in your book? Am I supposed to hate him now too?

But all he does is basically link to mainstream media news stories, so maybe it is indeed all bullshit gossip.

Calling him a pedophile is a nice, kindly touch. If it turns out to be true then I will join you in hating him, and buy you a beer.

But to veer back on point, I guess web design is like art, different people have different tastes. And if Drudge were a furniture-maker, he’d be a Shaker—he maintains a simple, elegant, functional design that stays true to form and shuns all the latest fads.

Till seeing this article after a friend sent me the link (he sent it to me because I am a graphic designer, I think) I have never seen or visited drudgereoprt.com.(probably wont be back either) My initial thoughts after first and only visit…

After viewing the site for the first time and reading this article and the comments, I can seriously say it’s the most beautiful and well designed site I have ever seen in form and function! HA HA HA!!! I’m sorry but it’s an insult to anyone who spends more than a few moments conceptualizing and truly designing a website.

“The best DESIGNED SITE ON THE INTERNET” ? “Asthetic masterpiece! I have a big grin on my face. Can’t stop thinking of the absurdity of this comment.

Can anyone imagine the internet with only stuff like this. That would be a dream come true. Please forgive my sarcasm.

[The only thing I think Drudge is doing right and it’s not at all design related is that he knows those 3,000,000 unique visitors to this site don’t care about design]

BTW: What’s wrong with design changing over time and getting new look or facelift? You still have wooden paneling in your home circa the 70’s? What kinda phone you using these days?

Thanks for the morning laugh! I need that.

I’ve clicked on every one of the alleged “better designed” sites or “Drudge look-a-like” sites in this comment area.

None of the supposed comparable sites look anything like the DR. I also have yet to see a linked-in site that is better designed.

I think some of you just want a few more hits to your own crumby sites or favorite stomping grounds.

Drudge is simple and that’s why I like it… I don’t have to flush through a bunch of pictures, advertisements, floating advertisements, etc… to catch the headlines.

Drudge has been my homepage since well before the Monica “blue dress” story broke. But he’s been ticking me off big time lately with his fear mongering stories about the stock market which I believe are causing even more fear. When the market rallies it gets little mention but when it drops 200 points it PLUNGES!! Cut it out, Drudge! Yes, it’s news…..but don’t add to the problem!!

drudge site truely beats tv or radio news – no stupid comercials !!!!! and he got ALL the news !!!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=goldieshome&view=videos

goldieshouse.piczo.com

The title of the post is, “Why the Drudge Report is one of THE BEST DESIGNED SITES on the web”.

THE BEST DESIGNED SITES THE BEST DESIGNED SITES THE BEST DESIGNED SITES

Let me reiterate one more time, THE BEST DESIGNED SITES.

This is a load of crap that ANY level of web designer on the planet should take offense too. Design is not the same as functionality. I think Drudge has great functionality, BUT TERRIBLE DESIGN. Don’t confuse the two. Load of crap.

Before everyone gets too excited (too late), I’d like to point out that the “wimpy” egalitarian approach to MSM site design nets more page views and longer stays by more unique visitors. I know this firsthand. For obvious reasons I can’t share the particulars with you, but I speak the truth.

Drudge’s approach might work up to a point (traffic, ad revenue, what have you), but beyond that it fails. And if a particular design philosophy doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the bottom line, only a fool calls it “better” or “best.”

Timothy Long

This is a cultivating topic, whether you agree or disagree with 37’s controversial appraisal of what I would call one of the more frustrating, non-usable, archaic websites on the internet.

YET, I love the Drudge experience. And it’s a true grassroots effort. Who wants another Huffington Post or a Hot Air? It IS timeless and I hope we never see that change.

It’s nice to see the web community showing its convictions.

Drudge was made obsolete several years ago by…... what’s it called again….... oh that’s it, a f ** RSS reader!!!

If you wake up of a morning and load up Drudge I feel sorry for you. As for the folks saying “if you don’t like how come you know what it looks like”, etc. Well since you only have to look at it once and it never changes (after you puke on the screen) then it’s hard not to know what it looks like.

GerhardWMagnus

After many years, Drudge is still the place I go first in the morning. In addition to the many virtues mentioned, the site reflects Matt’s many weird, entertaining obsessions. Plus there’s no better place on the web for learning what the American Idiots are thinking.

The site is great with ONE EXCEPTION! It refreshes waaaay too often. It’s annoying to be scanning the headers and have the damn thing reset to the top what seems like every 10 seconds. C’mon, the stories aren’t updated that fast..

What I like about Drudge is it is simple - it is no fancy, no frills and concentrates on the news, none of the other crap that exists on most news organizations’s sites. Drudge does an excellent job of combing news form different topics - politics, world news, sports news, hurricanes and other weather phenomena, gossip, etc. He has links to columns of all kinds of columnists. His site is a “news” site—for those of us interested in news and healines and no other stuff. He is cutting edge and I do not mind admitting that I am a daily multiple visitor to his site. I get a snapshot of what is “hot” out there regarding news. Kudos to Matt Drudge and I couldn;t thank him enough!

I visit Drudge regularly because it’s fast. Too many websites try to add too much in the name of aesthetics. If it slows down my loading time at all, I’m much less likely to visit it. This may be a carryover from my dial-up days, but even with high speed, I appreciate a lightning fast site over a good looking site any day. I also use Noscript on Firefox and it doesn’t break Drudge like it breaks other, more “professional” sites. Combine that with Adblock, and Drudge is a simple, fast to load, fast to read, website which doesn’t collapse when scripts and advertisements are blocked. (Noscript fixes the annoying autorefresh on Drudge, too.)

christy mccormick

I am a massive Drudge fan. I speak as a journalist and as a trade paper and website editor. I attempt to get something of the Drudge approach on my news site, usually a dozen stories a day.

I have been gratified that my much better equipped and staffed rivals are copying what I am doing to extend their reach. Like Drudge I take from everyone, but unlike him, re-write and credit the source. I would do what he does, but the boss and the journalists hate Drudge. Don’t as me why. Their reasons – my brother’s (fellow journalist ) are profoundly prejudiced and idiotic. What I mostly copy is his wide range of range of stories.

This is an aspect of the operation over which I have control. Design is taken care of designers who I have long wanted to drown in bathtubs. I would willinglym hold them down myself and listen to their last gurgle. They are a tower of ignorant prejudice.

I quite agree with the observations made about Drudge design, though. What Drudge does is really anti- design, a forgetting about design entirely and that is a key element of his success. What he evidently wanted was a practical way to present a high degree of reader choice on a computer screen available to most people. He had that eye for the obvious that has eluded so many web page designers that scrolling faster that clicking and readers like getting this business over with and don’t give a tinker’s fart how pretty it all is.

Anyway, nice to pay homage to Matt Drudge, who will stand high in the annals of world journalism, higher than Defoe of The Review, Delaney of The Times, Greely of the Tribune and Hearst and Pulitzer of The Journal and The World.

Who else stands higher than Matt Drudge in the last 100 years?

You can see. I am a fan.

throw craigslist in there as one of the best designed sites (similar to drudge) and i would agree.

nice to see someone who does the hard work and doesn’t get into all the fluff. believe it or not, google’s success is largely due to their simplicity, at least their bread and butter main search page. not much there and basically the same as it’s always been.

Harry Pierce

Jason makes some great points, and has undoubtedly made people see things in a new light. Personally, I prefer http://politicalnewsconnection.com/ . Similar functionality, but more aesthetically pleasing.

What a big joke. DrudgeReport is nothing more than a huge table with a short refresh rate.

Drudge has been my primary source for news for quite some time. I love because of the reasons you described. Props to Matt Drudge.

It’s all about functionality. Just what I prefer on a news related site.

I really think this article is just a “being contrary for contrary’s sake” piece.

If you want to argue that his site is easy to maintain, I’ll definitely give you that. But there is no way you can call it well-designed.

Simple sites like Google or Craig’s List eschew design flourishes in favor of utility. The Drudge Report eschews design flourishes because Drudge isn’t a designer or coder and is just doing the bare minimum of what he knows how to do.

Drudge’s site can teach several things: content is king, unique is good, consistency is good, etc. But to conclude that this is good design is foolish. There’s a world of difference between his site and MSNBC and it’s not an either/or situation—Drudge could certainly get a cleaned up, easy-to-maintain design that would look better, be more usable, and probably increase his traffic without resorting to a Web 2.0-tarted up corporate clone.

I really don’t understand this concept of “well designed”... But I have to agree, IT’S UGLY!!!

Drudge is my first stop every time I log in. FIrst it is black and white monotype. It is an especially good font for people with bad eyes like mine.

It uses serif font, with small tags on the letters to make an ‘i’ easily distinguishable from an ‘l’. Arial is the worst font for bad eyes because the letters are crammed together without tags. If you have astigmatism, lines tend to multiply themselves and overlap the next letter. ‘il’ could read ‘ll’ or ‘ii’ etc. Farsightedness, or the extreme nearsightedness I have, blurs letters into each other so arial which stacks narrow letters close is painful to read.

I have always felt the arial in Windows was the arrogance of the Gates crowd, if you are too old or slow to read arial, get out of the way.

White is the brightest color on a display screen (the most spectrum of light) which is important to very nearsighted people like me, and for people with macular problems. Black on white gives the most clarity.

Finally, the letters are rounded. That is critical for easy reading because curves of adjacent letters trend away from each other making them more readable.

Other people may not notice, but with my bad eyes there is instant relief switching to Drudge. My eyestrain leaves and it feels so good to read. I avoid arial sites as much as possible.

Without his intelligent reporting I would not read Drudge. He never wastes a headline. There is a story behind every word. Drudge is clever and chooses the version of a story that often contains hidden gems that contradict the title.

Some people who hate Drudge cannot explain their venom because he hits home.

For instance, a headline that appeared to make Mrs McCain look like a harpy linked to an article that laid out a case to the opposite, using her own words and actions. This is the sort of skill the big news sites lack. Their enemies are devils and their friends are all saints, but they skip the proof.

Drudge uses their articles with his headlines to create an argument. That is brilliant

The mainstream news sites are artsy fartsy dark and grim, hard to read, hard to navigate, and lead to articles of small value.

Drudge has the most readable news site, doesn’t waste my brain scans with sidebars of junk, and contains hidden treasure. He is simply the best editor on the web and no one else comes close

It’s delightly easy to use and very functional! I have often commented on how well designed it is! It is not needlessly fussy or embellished.

According to websiteoutlook.com, Drudge makes almost $4,500 per DAY in revenue. Not a bad living.

It’s simplicity itself. That’s why the site works so well. So I think Jason nailed it.

Bravo Jason, you are right on. I check Drudge several times a day. Its easy to scan, easy to use and has no bells or whistles to get in the way. Many sites are “upgrading” to uselessness…TVGuide.com being chief among them. One addition: You left out one of the most useful aspects of the site: the list of links to op-ed writers columns.

I just wish more sites would keep things simple and straightforward instead of trying to “artsy” themselves out of usefulness. My guess is that constantly urging upgrades is a way of keeping webdesigners employed.

You are correct. The site is like a Volkswagen Beetle from the old days… plain, simple and to the point.

It’s brilliant in its simplicity. So many sites have too much going on trying to lure your eyes in 20 different directions with a thousand distracting ads.

I start at the left, down, and work my way right. Easy. Done. Then I check again in a couple of hours.

Again, brilliant.

getrealbubba

Yea.. lots of stuff there.. but completely biased as all other web sites are… GOP lover all the way.

Clean, crisp, straight forward- I love the site.

Drudge’s site is all right but try this one for a well designed site and more: www.thewebspy.com

It’s much more inclusive than drudges or anyone else on the web

After reading the article I say, it doesn’t matter what other people think or say about the site, it is still my favorite web site. It also seems to be the least biased information site I have seen.

You didn’t mention the photos. He uses unique photos that don’t link. That’s another unique (gawd, I hate using the same modifier twice like this in a row but its gawdawful just the only way to say it so true) aspect that you didn’t mention in your report. Drudges’ photos are terrific teasers and they dot the page. His page is not only text as you described it. Photos tell so much more. His use of photos to make points and incite internal emotional content within the reader’s mind is a fabulous non-mentionable technique that you didn’t even mention it in your fantastic write up. How’s that for the sedate power of his page.

Good design is design that functions – the Drudge Report, as you put so well, does that, really well. It ain’t nice graphic design but that’s not its purpose is it? I think we get too caught up in the visual elements of design and forget function sometimes.

nelson salsa

As a news junkie, I go to Drudge because its there! nothing fancy, right to the point; other sites are too cluster with advertisment, which is why I keep coming back. for those who have a dog, know it’s why a dog goes back to its favorite bone, it feels just right. Thanks for the article it’s right!

While he does have a few good points, (Some of those points contradict themselves though) I think he’s missing the point as to why that’s a popular site. The real reason people who do go there continue to go there is because he has breaking news before anyone else, and they would go no matter what it looked like even if they are uncomfortable. I don’t think he used any true stats to come to his decision, He doesn’t mention any, In fact, Amazon and E-bay (ugly sites as well) both did a study of this same reasoning a few years back before they redid their sites and found that while aesthetics are not everything, when balanced with content, style is necessary, but in the end it is the content that keeps people coming back. We can choose to make people comfortable while they are visiting or not.

Agree and Disagree. The only thing I disagree with is that it “is” disorganized and from a customer’s perspective, a few news groups on the page would be really helpful like: Politics, Entertainment, Business, etc. Just like 4-5 sections grouping the scattered news links would please 80%+ of his users. In having to scan all around to see what’s new and what the stories are is stupid and results in many customers glancing, not seeing new links and clicking away. It may get him more clicks but it’s frustrating at times and not customer friendly.

Mark - Chicago

Great article! You hit it dead on! When I want information I want it fast and easy to find. The other news sites are so bloated with code and eye candy they are slow to load and even slower to find what you are looking for. Many of the articles on those other sites belong on page 57 of your local paper. Drudge digs out the good stuff i want to read and spares me the annoyance of having to flesh it out myself. BIG kudos to Matt Drudge!!!

One of the most informative sites on the web. I visit it several times a day and get great links to the world’s news. Thank you Matt Drudge!

I designed the first multimedia corporate websites beginning in 1988 – before icon ‘clickon’ technology (I used F1 – F12 as thumb picture indicators for navigation) and before the internet. It was called Videotext then – the bridge concept between BBS’s (like Compuserve) and the modern Internet graphic format. My sites all operated pretty much like Matts site. Simple, quick, easily navicable, appropriately functional. The key is not to present a visual dilemma. I still do them this way. Most web designers and their clients don’t have a clue.

LK - Dallas

What is the objection to the content? He links to other news sites and sources.

@John If you think Drudge is bias you should probably do your homework before you start spouting off about it. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm

3 tables is the best design….haaaaaa html 101 people

Mark-Reading,PA

http://www.drudgereport.com will always be the home page for any computer I own.

I love how “serious designers” feel that real design is so superior to the Drudge Report. I wonder how some of them would design a screwdriver – surely something so simple can’t be good design. Does the site have style? Of course it does – DR has been cloned and parodied often because it has a look and feel that is immediately recognizable as Drudge. How can that not be style? Finally, I would peg him as more sensationalist than conservative. He often posts stories derogatory of conservative figures – but there’s not a teacher accused of having sex with a student that doesn’t find themselves plastered on his page.

what the...

I just had a seizure after clicking that drudge report link

Experienced

The enquirer has a lot of subscribers too, does that make it a good magazine? No but it is designed right for the people that read it.. Drudge is designed for his demographics….

Drudge does miss some stories and lately, he seems to be more like the MSM but he’s useful. Let’s see Drudge hit some real taboo topics like the Holocaust researchers in Germany (like Ernst Zundel) or Mossad and their 9/11 involvement . Anyway, he’s still better than the MSM.

Jay - Corpus Christi

One more good thing about the Drudge Report… no user comments appended to the bottom of his page.

I wish more designers could see the Drudge Report teh way you do.

In today’s age of technology, one of the most important foundations is often overlooked: SIMPLICITY. Simplicity is often undervalued and overlooked. I detest complexity, detest convoluted and complicated websites and I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way. Drudge has my eyes because it is simple and this makes it valuable. Simplicity is king in an age when techology rules behavior (behavior is supposed to rule technology, not vice-versa). When I hit a complex website, I go elsewhere. When I hit a simple website, I stay and I will use it again if needed. Yahoo used to have this simplicity, now it’s got flash, rotating menus, and a whole bunch of craziness going on. By the way, if you think I’m just an old fart that doesn’t like change, you’re wrong. I’m 29 and I work in IT. In IT, if you don’t keep it simple, you will drown and die (never build 2 servers when 1 will do the job, etc.). I put simplicity first and have succeeded.

By the way, google does the same thing. Go to google and go to msn or yahoo. Which one is simpler to use? Which one is eating the other’s lunch?

Drudge. Google. Apple. Simple. Easy. Fewer problems. Hello.

Yahoo. Microsoft. Complex. Difficult. Problems. Goodbye.

Function-smart… Design simplicity leads to design jackpot. Design crit creates attention, free PR, more money….success.

KISS… for timelessness’ sake.

Drudge’s simple style is comparable to Google’s homepage. This is a trademark of sorts. People are attracted to the familiar, especially if it is reliable (as both are). Dont fix it if it is not broken.

As far as the content goes, Drudge has proven to have a knack for spotting the most timely and important stories. Amost without fail the news item he chooses to accentuate (story or stories) dominates cable and print news within 24-48 hours.

I guess it is timeless…

It was a piece of shit by 1997 standards, 2000 standards, 2005 standards, and is a piece of shit by today’s standards.

See…timeless.

He breaks news before anyone else and he does it well. That’s all.

what’s no to like. you can get everywhere from drudge. you want pat buchanan, you get pat buchanan. you want left wingers, you got ‘em. breaking news, new on the hour… what could you people not be getting… if you want opinion go to the huffinton post… if you want a navigation tool, i say stick with drudge. who cares about the design when you’re in a hurry to cover as much information as you can in the least amount of time? if you don’t like that its biases , skip that info and go to your own bias… and best of all it’s free…

He could have had 10 million hits a month with better aesthetics, functionality and design… Lazy!

craigslist trumps drudge report in functionality and visual aesthetics.

great article. now i’m clicking back to drudge

So, there are “no tricks” on the Drudge site? Oh, really? Have you compared the link teaser to the actual story on the other end of the link? Not a week goes by that there isn’t at least one glaring lie in a teaser, and they ALL lean far right, of course.

Example: A Drudge link claimed that “San Francsico bans fireplaces!”, but clicking the link took you to a story that didn’t even MENTION San Francisco, but instead was a report about the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s PRELIMINARY HEARING on air quality issues, which had a slight mention about future investigations involving household fireplaces. NO ban was even mentioned.

As far as the esthetics of the Drudge links page goes (I refuse to call it a “report” since it consists only of links to the reports by others), it’s simple three columns of links, with a few photos. Big deal.

just what the doc ordered. simple. can get every editorial writer who’s good. and it brings the news before anyone else. most people ck the site several times a day to see what’s happening.

only prob is it is hard to get a story that has been taken down unless you have the exact words.

Jeanne Walker

I have been reading Drudge every day since the first day it came on and I wouldnt miss it for anythiing. I am 73 years old and have sent this link to all my family members. It is great.

Has anyone seen the “mobile” drudge report?

www.idrudgereport.com

Every link in the main site, when clicked on, loads a page that repeats “not compatible with mobile devices.”

HOWEVER, if you click on the “mobile-compatible site list,” you get ABC, CBS, USA Today and so on. They all link to their respective mobile headline pages.

OH, and it has a really purty background photo, too.

37Signals…care to comment on this masterpieceofshit?

The fact that it’s “one page” with “no content” and it still takes a staggering amount of energy to scan and process would make it a design failure in my book. There are two basic components to design, form and function and this site lacks both.

The things you are outlining as good design here is not design at all, but more along the lines of (bad) personal opinion, gimmick, novelty and economics.

XXXKarenXXX

Best considered opinion of the Drudge Report I’ve ever read. Never thought of it as great design, but I’m convinced. Great design is the perfect union of form and function. That’s the Drudge Report. First and last site I hit every single day. Drudge drives the news while all the alphabets -ABC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, etc. - act as a a filter not a conduit. (Remember, Drudge Hate dates to his “report…developing…” that outed the Bill and Lewinsky story. Everybody had it, no one had the guts to run with it). And Drudge makes my day every time he runs that picture of John Kerry climbing out of that tube at NASA looking like the sperm in Woody Allen’s “Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask”!

Robyn Davenport

It just goes to show that content is KING …

I dunno… normally, I agree w/ most everything you post, but I just can’t bring myself to agree here.

I concur that simplicity is great, and there may be some aspects to Drudge Report that make a lot of sense from a usability/functionality standpoint. Furthermore, I agree that Drudge is successful at what he does. That being said, I just can’t agree that this site qualifies as one of the best designed sites on the web.

All of your points that I agree with could easily be achieved while making great strides toward readability, clarity and an improved aesthetic quality.

I agree wholeheartedly that design is more than just aesthetics, but I think calling the Drudge Report one of the best designed sites on the web is a HUGE stretch.

I think this is because Matt Drudge has an eye for design, perhaps because he is gay. I wonder if all the ultra conservatives who go there know that he likes to frequent gay clubs?

Libertyaholic

I agree with Jason’s comment above – but boy – Drudge is kind of like going to McDonald’s: It’s not the best food in the world, but the quality is consistent, it fills you up, and you can eat it fast.

Ólafur Nielsen

In the case of news websites I think it’s not so much a question of being an eye pleaser. It’s about maintaining the same reading path through the site. Users learn how to scan your page as walking down a ladder, if you put an extra step or take one out they’ll be confused.

I wouldn’t take “newsworthy” too literally. If Drudge is a master of anything, it’s finding titilating stories generating interesting headlines.

Whatever you think about the story he’s chosen to link to, you can’t miss it (and probably most don’t want to miss it)—and I think that is the point.

Matt Edwards

Drudge Report brought me to this article using one simple line.

Enough said.

I hate the site design, but I still look at the damn thing everyday. I guess that says something.

Excellent analysis of a great site. Thank you.

Just like google, drudge uses simplicity to load quickly and put everything you want in an easy to use format. It is function over eye candy.

However, I do wish he would turn off the automatic refresh or use newer technology (ajax?) so the refresh doesn’t scroll my browser back to the top of the screen. This is especially frustring on my PDA which loads slower and requires much more work to find where I left off.

Kory Hoopes

What does Matt Drudge’s personal life or interests have to do with the design of the site?

The lack of colorful extras and confined use of whitespace makes me focus on the bold headlines, simple and to the point it gets a message across faster than any other website I’ve been too.

That there are no “categories” listed in Drudge’s site; this is a bonus. All the “stories” instead are specifically listed on the front page. I don’t have to link to get to another category. My interests are many. I don’t have to scroll and scroll to see what’s on the highlights. One page. All on the front. No categories to link.

I remember hearing this acronym back in grade school and it still applies today, as Drudge has proven.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid)

And it works! I’d much rather go to a site like Drudge, find an interesting story to read in seconds.. instead of going to ALL these other news sites and weeding through all the BS. Drudge weeds through the BS for you so you don’t have to. How anyone finds his site confusing or unorganized is beyond me. It doesn’t get much simpler or straight forward than this. For those that don’t agree with his site design, try making one on your own and see how successful you are.

The one thing that Matt has.. is the “smarts”..Admire him for that if nothing else..Credit is not cheap nowadays..Which is rather overrated anyway due to the “stupidness affect” of people who will not put aside their ‘comic’ before coming here.

How does one improve ones worth if your employees have temporary run out of ideas..You get the Marketing blokes in and within five minutes they will ask you two questions..”Who/where is your market/customers”,then second question will be a no brainer..”Get them to provide you your next million”..So Matt goes away,thinks awhile… then runs to the edit/preparation room and tells his editorial techies to ask the customers a simple question…The question is shrouded in nuance and suspicion and some people will feel “Here is my chance to impale Matt with his “script type=”text/javascript” var timer = setInterval(“autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3); function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);} ./script”..”and provide Matt with yet MORE hits(with the ‘refresher’ earning its keep),,,,.I speak of course of the techies that reads the more advanced comics.(less pictures)

If you don’t like Matt’s “refreshing” approach to hits and still like his simple,informatory and instructive method of news preparation then..again….put that comic aside and use the search engines to cancel the affect..IT IS ALL THERE waiting its capture..Don’t be so lazy and immature…If you STILL live with your mother..ASK HER FIRST…

Why do you think the USA-UK-Germany had at one time the greatest Engineers and Ph.D’s(Piled higher & Deeper) and were responsible for pushing that envelope more than any other group of nations..It is because they used their cerebral muscle that thing beneath their forehead.. while the rest of the World were…...YES…..READING COMICS.]

Now I am going back to Matt’s page to read the rest of the news..Don’t bother me again…else I’ll take your comic away…..without malice

Ps..If Matt puts the refreshing engine on this comment page..Don’t panic..Just type like hell and forget the spelling errors :-)

I disagree. It’s ugly, not easy to read, and the refresh rate is extremely annoying.

Fark.com – ‘nuff said.

Dave McConnell

It clearly works because the content is compelling, but I think you’ve given them far too much credit for “effective design.” The no-design aesthetic doesn’t do it for me and I tend to avoid sites like that and discredit them as unprofessional.

This is akin to a startup company that sets up shop in their unfinished basement. They figure once they make it big, they’ll move to an artsy suite downtown, but never quite get around to it.

Hey, they still do great work, but their space still looks like crap and they probably wouldn’t want to bring clients to it.

But he uses physical HTML – look and see the tables…argh!!!

It is loosely based on scitechdaily is another, though they’ve updated their design a bit, keeping the basic layout.

“Well, again, I think its counterpart HINESSIGHT has a much cleaner look, is more informative and seems to get the right stuff on at the right time. http://www.hinessight.com”

As to the above lauded web site: I came, I saw, I left.

It is a far cry from the easy to scan Drudge site. You could call it:

Scroll, scroll, scroll your site, gently down the page …..

JimmyJoJack

Meh… The Drudge Report is boring. Ugly as sin, and too clusterfucked. You’re a moron to think it holds ANY quality design aspects. Go now… go and douse your eyes with bleach. Maybe then you’ll be able to see quality design.

Chuckabutty

I heartily agree with the reader who said the refresh rate of Drudge’s site is annoying. I have written him on many occasions to ask why he does this, and to tame it down a bit. He always ignores my comment because he is arrogant and thinks he is doing everyone a great favor. He even has a link to click in order to refresh, again. Who needs to update his page every thirty seconds, in between the one-minute rate he has set? Often times there isn’t even anything new. I hate his website because of this. Drudge is an arrogant, conceited fool. I click on his page once in a while but I don’t rely on him for news. It’s entertainment more than anything else.

One of the first pages I check don’t change a thing! Been a fan since 1999

I love how most of the people with withering criticisms of Drudge are clearly identifiable as liberals. These critics simply cannot separate their hatred for what they see as Drudge’s conservative outlook from the salient points that 37signals makes about the site’s design.

Drudge’s target is the newshound, the one looking for the most up-to-date snippets of stories, even rumors. This audience feels perfectly capable of evaluating each story on its merits—they’re consumers of journalism, not “ditto-heads”. They just want the most current stuff there is, in profusion, and visit Drudge because he provides it. The simplicity of the site just facilitates the hunt-and-peck style of the true news junkie’s browsing style. If you’re not in this audience, if you can’t stand to have your delicate liberal sensibilities offended by the crash, vigor and slop of everyday life, then by all means stick with HuffPuff and avoid Drudge. He’ll continue to do very well without you.

The message is STILL not getting through it seems

[Repeat] The one thing that Matt has.. is the “smarts”..Admire him for that if nothing else..Credit is not cheap nowadays..Which is rather overrated anyway due to the “stupidness affect” of people who will not put aside their ‘comic’ before coming here.

If you don’t like Matt’s “refreshing” approach to hits and still like his simple,informatory and instructive method of news preparation then..again….put that comic aside and use the search engines to cancel the affect..IT IS ALL THERE waiting its capture..Don’t be so lazy and immature…If you STILL live with your mother..ASK HER FIRST …

Why do you think the USA -UK-Germany had at one time the greatest Engineers and Ph.D’s(Piled higher & Deeper) and were responsible for pushing that envelope more than any other group of nations..It is because they used their cerebral muscle that thing beneath their forehead.. while the rest of the World were……YES…..READING COMICS .]

Brendt Waters

Most of the points raised here could be applied to Micro$oft Windoze. That alone tells you that the overall premise is faulty.

I wouldn’t say it Drudge is well designed, though I can see the point you attempt to make.

Rather, I would say it has a utilitarian lack of design. Which is not a bad thing.

I do have some problems with your reasoning though.

Everything under the headlines ‘Staying power,’ ‘It’s straightforward,’ ‘It’s unique,’ ‘This is important,’ and ‘Breaking news is breaking news’ is not design. At best those are business decisions.

Timeless is a style/fashion consideration, not design, and it is certainly not indicated by something lasting a long time. It is indicated by something remaining pervasive throughout culture from it’s inception. Ergo jeans are timeless… they continue to look good and remain in wide use despite having been around for a long time. Drudge by comparison is just static.

Kevin Walsh

MY site, Forgotten New York

www.forgotten-ny.com

looks pretty much the same as in 1999. I neatened it up some the last few years, but it’s still pretty much the same. I see no need to change it.

Kevin Lambley

The Daily Telegraph (London) used to be a great site too, textually oriented. All sites have gone to a flashy flashing format now where videos start up without you wanting them to (blaring noise into your house in the middle of the night, unexpectedly) and bells and whistles going off every where. how annoying. The most popular news sites remain drudge and worldnetdaily and both are textually oriented. most people don’t want the bells and whistles, just the basic information.

Does Drudge have counters behind each link? Some stories stay forever while others come and go in a flash.

Does Drudge know what stories are getting the most hits? It seems as if the other news agencies will take a Drudge story and run with it because they know people are reading it.

Does Drudge use those counters as leverage? Does Drudge charge a fee for the UK Sun link then back up his rates with numbers?

There is more to the web site than this story reports on.

Good Job Matt Drudge….

Norm Chapman

Love it or hate it, Drudge is my first place to look for news and what’s happening in the world. All the reasons you said were right on and very precise. The site gets it quick, fast and in a concise manner. I don’t allows agree with the subtle politics of the sight but I have to admit I look at it first thing in the morning, the first thing when I get into work and keep it up all day and it is probably the last thing I look at in the evening…Drudge rocks and I would now be lost without it.

Keep up the good work and don’t change a thing.

It’s funny to see all the jealous rage of the elitist “designers” who deep down realize that content matters more than bullshit..

The Drudge Report is not biased… It simply links to other news sites like the AP, NYTimes, and others..

I find it much less biased than CNN, FoxNews, and most other so called unbiased news outlets..

This is hilarious. Look how freakin long the comments are. What an amazing cooperative waste of time I am joining in on here. :) The discourse is split between kudos to the author (kudos btw), ‘highbrow’ chatters about what – IS – design (zzz), and consistently biased negative comments that yield fallacies in their arguments. Nearly every single negative comment about Drudge’s ‘design’ is amazingly consistent in a bias against Drudge the persona that it obscures their attempts at portraying themselves as objective in critiquing design. Or even funnier, sometimes the bias is used intentionally as objective reasoning to dismiss the Drudge ‘design’ (insert a Scooby ‘haargh?’ here). A review of this nice large sample of comments and you begin to see consistencies in the way people allow their preconcepts to turn the attempts at objectivity into college 101 argument fallacies.

Jason should hold a Drudge redesign contest to see who can do the best job at messing up Drudge’s effective utility.

i love the drudgemister!!!!

I agree with your fair assessment of the Drudge Report. It’s been my home page since I heard about it from Rush Limbaugh.

It’s funny that people are critical of Drudge’s news. As you point out in your article, Drudge merely posts links to newstories on his sites.

Thanks to Drudge, I found your article.

I started going to the drudgereport a few months before Lewinsky broke. For one, it was a great place to watch for earthquake swarms.

I did not know who all those opinion sites were back then, but going through his site now, I recognize 80% of the names. So drudge was ahead of the curve on columnists, as well as helping people realize information was power.

Back in those days, also, there were many many link consolidators. I thought, as did many, that Drudge would be surpassed and obsoleted by these better funded competitors.

However, Drudge did the one thing no one else did, link to interesting news stories, every day, and often different links each few hours. He created a “brand” that you could not get away from for fear of missing a big story. When he did a radio show, it was clear his politics leaned conservative/libertarian, but the links on his site were news, not agenda.

After his competitors died off for a few years, recently there have been more sites which have link sections built in. But none have the simplicity and “addiction” of just going to drudge during the day and seeing what interesting news is developing.

Perhaps the main reason he has succeeded over the years is that one can take a break from news sites, get busy with work, and a sneak peek at drudgereport will tell you if anything really important has happened or not. That is a knack few people have been capable of sustaining.

There is one other link-driven site, which I kept up with, lucianne.com. (It started during the Lewinsky news cycle.) It is primarily conservative newslinks, but member created, so always current. It is another place to browse and look for interesting new breaking headlines for the day. Very simple, but not as successful as drudge has been. There are many sites like this one, more and less technologically saavy, but Drudge has increased his numbers every year for over 12 years, a phenominal sucess story.

Lauriate Roly

I think you are all full of crap. It’s just about the most aggravating and stupid site in the computer online universe. It doesn’t tell you anything unless you link back to other frequently unknown sites belonging to often obscure news media. And the infernal, automatic switch-off, every four or five minutes is so ridiculously irritating, just created to make us think we are being cut off so that we can get some breaking news item. It’s a dumb site. Very overrated. (and I’m stupid for ever bothering with it. So, I think I’ll quit).

Simpler is often better, and Drudge is simple. On the other hand, there are other simple approaches that are much better looking and more usable, and which may or may not be more work for the hoster.

I have three problems with Drudge which override the simple interface: 1. I’d like a little bit more editorial effort on the part of the site – some organization, categorization, etc. Doesn’t have to be much, but some. Drudge may not have time to do a better job, but I don’t have time to try to find something interesting. (Other more complicated sites give me the same problem, from the other end of the spectrum. nytimes.com does the right amount – I always know where I am and where I can go, and they do a good job of providing headlines on the home page.) 2. It’s ugly. 3. I don’t like its politics. Personal taste, but there you go.

Scott from Long Island

You nailed it for sure, very well-written article and you are 100% correct. Best part of your piece if when you talk about the secret to directing internet traffic. Bravo to you and bravo to Drudge for being the only real news “home page”

I find the Drudge Report has a very easy format to scan the news. Just click on the article that your intrested in and your right there. I have been a daily reader of Drudge for the past ten years. He has amazing hits daily but the fact is that not everyone is aware of the site. If he wanted to he could advertise and double his daily hits.

I like his format so much that I designed my new web site to be similar. www.bigtimesinfo.com

Since this article has such great feedback perhaps you can visit my site and let my know your thoughts too? Big Times Info has a section half way down the page on the left column “contact Big Times Info”.

wow. here’s the amazing thing. drudge doesn’t get NEARLY the amount of traffic that he’s saying. i bet some of you techno-geeks have access to his ACTUAL traffic. it’s around 3000 unique visitors per day. that’s it. his bravado, actually, ought to be investigated because it is not true. his servers are not big enough to handle his touted stats and if you notice, his stats are a pdf. which mean that the graphic kudos should go to the person who creates that artistic (but from what i believe fake) graph. do some digging and you will see that what i am saying is true. and since the internet is the wild west right now, no one is taking him to task. i hope someone does! even though i have nothing against HIM, i do not like people who fake stuff.

The only problem I’ve had with Drudge – and I’ve sent emails numerous times to him to no avail – is that too many times he has stories that link back to his home page because the story isn’t ready.

The thing is, many times he does do it properly – if a story isn’t ready or he doesn’t have the link for it yet, he’ll post the headline in plain text. Since it isn’t underlined, you know there isn’t a link to click on.

But too many times he appears to be too lazy to turn off the link code – instead he just puts in the URL of his home page. It’s very frustrating to click on it and just see the home page all over again. He doesn’t even bother putting in “Developing” to tip you off.

So now I always have to hover over each of the links and look at the bottom of my browser to see what link it intends to take me to and if there really is a story to read. And if it is looping back to his home page, I have to make a mental note to keep checking it until he gets off his ass and puts the proper address in.

Yes its a great design as it does everything it needs to and nothing more and does it so simply.

Its very easy for users. Could it be better? Maybe, but it doesn’t have to (users keep returning) and it would be very easy to maintain. This means that Drudge continues doing what he is good at whilst not surrendering to the headaches of enhancements/changes.

I would like to do something similar, focusing purely on ‘good news’, ie, reporting the things that really tickle me each day. Anyone interested in helping?

foxnews.com must have been designed by drudge in his spare time.

I wouldn’t say it was well designed (neither is mine). Some people love it, others hate it. It is definitely functional and because it is all on one page, you can relatively quickly find something of interest – if there is anything there for you.

Dorothy thinks he has no traffic. Doll, you don’t know what you are saying. I have 12,000 to 20,000 visitors per day and drudge has over 250,000 to 300,000 per day. Not only is he consistent, he is growing, around the same rate as my site, which means I may never catch up to him. CNN and many other news sites, are dropping off, but way above both of us.

As others have said, the only thing I don’t like is the inability to send someone else there and have them see the same things I saw the day before, because things disappear.

Ugly but functional.

Dave Aiello

The U.S. Attorney General collapsed tonight in Washington while giving a speech. Initially all of the major news-oriented websites put that story up in their “Breaking News” section.

Shortly after the story broke, sites such as CNN put up another story as Breaking News, about Barack Obama leaning toward choosing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State after Thanksgiving:

http://skitch.com/daveaiello/hepa/cnn-attorney-general-collapses

It’s incredible that CNN would imply that this story, which is pure speculation, is breaking news so shortly after a sitting cabinet member collapses in public.

What will sites like this look like on the day of a terrorist attack, an attempt on a world leader’s life, or another truly significant news event?

Dudge stays with a story until it’s clear that most people have the news they need to know. That’s why his site is always worth glancing it.

Some good points and an interesting perspective, but, being a first-time visitor, it took me some time to figure out which headlines belong to which photos, why some headlines are red, what those lists are down the page, what the various form fields are for, and don’t you think a majority of new users would try to click on those images? The main headline, when I visited, was “AG COLLAPSE ON STAGE IN DC.” There was associated no description or image, and I didn’t know what “AG” stood for, so, I couldn’t even be sure whether or not I wanted to click on the top story. When I did, I realized I wasn’t even interested in that news. I’d say those are some pretty clear-cut examples of poor web design, no?

Skyrello, you can’t blame a headline on design – what he did was an Editor’s shortcut. Editors can make mistakes on headlines, it is easy to do when you’re trying to make it short and punchy and you don’t realise that not everyone will get it.

But what you don’t understand, as a Drudge neophyte is that the headline is spelled out in full, just below and to the left.

That top headline – and this IS the design part – is there to catch your eye, make you curious enough to dig deeper, happy that he got the news to you so fast.

anyone who watched the video “jason’s talk at the bif,” he describes one of his fundamental factors of success as being a “teacher.”

i agree wholeheartedly with that statement. in my agency days, what really made the difference between an everyday project and a standout project was our staff being able to walk into a meeting and tell them what we truly felt their project needed, many times flying in the face of what they asked for. i’m sure many of you know how difficult this can be, but the payoff can be incredible.

this post was not about the “popularity” of the drudge report. that point is obvious. it was a question of whether or not it is one of the “best designed sites on the web.”

at present, the drudge report has over 200 links on a single page with ZERO organization.

so, to all you usability experts jumping on the drudge/37s bandwagon, would any one of you have the guts to walk into a client’s office and present a site like this as your best option in terms of design, usability, speed, whatever?

in my mind, the rest of this conversation is semantic bs.

Mugen nailed it for me.

The site is atrocious, but it’s good enough and it’s cheap. There’s nothing great about it, and to say it’s “one of the best designed sites on the web” is a joke.

It IS however, the best site for Matt Drudge, and I guess that’s all that matters.

Any dev/designer who thinks Drudge Report is a good example of usability and design (let alone one of the best) needs to step away from the computer and find a new day job.

The UK Guardianseems to’ve taken cues from Drudge. It’s my favourite UK newssite, and the most successful.

Looks almost like a site with its style sheet turned off…or something typed out on a typewriter…this isn’t design, it’s a newswire

Matt Montag

I must interject to say, though I love 37signals, this blog is poorly designed. Why? I can’t select text across paragraphs in the comments. I can only select one paragraph at a time.

I won’t bother to ask for an explanation or stick around for the lecture on standards compliance because this should just work.

P.S.- Firefox 3.0.4

If that’s your inspiration now I know why basecamp is so poorly designed…

hey newsblaze….like your site. listen. i have it on inside info into his server info (which is NOT firewalled by the way and available to anyone who can check site stats) that drudge is NOT getting the unique viewers that he says. you should be PROUD of yourself cuz you are getting WAY more views that he is. i swear. he’s been around a long time and hasn’t changed a thing and the brietbart guy does a LOT of his writing FOR him. you guys are all being fooled by his claimed stats. and EVERYONE is being fooled. you have a site….might you be able to ask around and see what you find out? seriously. you’ll walk super tall when you find out the truth. unless he’s saying that ‘hits’ are visitors. you have a site. you know the difference in your stats between hits and visitors? whaddya think? :)

Craig Baldwin

Must say I’d never heard of the Drudge Report until today, but it certainly is an impressively minimalistic site.

It’s the name: THE DRUDGE REPORT. How can you not read something with a name that bad?

Aaron Davies

re: cookie-cutter news sites: the IHT is the only thing that came to mind as at all distinctive, with the three-column gimmick on the stories, but they seem to have tucked that away in an option now. and i still hate them for their horrible javascript tricks.

cheri sigmon

As someone who has been on the web since its inception, an early adopter, I’ve seen thousands of different types of web sites. A minimalistic, simple, and effective site or page can be just as good (if not better) than a fancy and visually overloaded site or page. With information overload being the norm and not the exception, I think his site works well.

I plan to change some of our older sites after reading this. Thanks! Good discussions above. I’m thinking: go SIMPLE.

Regards, Cheri

Twitter: @LongestWiener (dog), a charity contest…

Seems to me that Drudge has a utilitarian design. That is a design is it not?

It has a style that its been using since it started, a style that is uniquely all its own. That is a style right? It isn’t stylish, but not being stylish doesn’t indicate an absence of style.

There is an RSS feed: http://drudgereportfeed.com/

I don’t go to the site, I don’t use it and I don’t care what the content of the site is about, but I do see where the author is coming from on the site being one of the best designed on the web.

It is a site that is setup very well to perform its function. You can argue about what you whether you want to call that “design” or “style”, but I don’t think that changes the overall point.

I agree. My site is simple at Nuovo Labs

This discussion is closed.

About jason fried.

Jason co-founded Basecamp back in 1999. He also co-authored REWORK , the New York Times bestselling book on running a "right-sized" business. Co-founded, co-authored... Can he do anything on his own?

Read all of Jason Fried’s posts , and follow Jason Fried on Twitter .

Home › Posts › Oct 11, 2009

Drudge Report template - 3 column link display page in HTML

To start … the HTML on Drudge report is very poor. It was a table-style layout for no discernible reason, there were capitalized tags and attributes throughout, and it looked like it may have been avoiding CSS altogether. It’s really none of my business how other people put their sites together but it was clear I wouldn’t be drawing any inspiration from the technical construction. So I started from scratch and made this very simple, lightweight, one-file, one-page site template that mimics the layout of Drudge report with a few extra features.

Download the free Drudge-Style Template

How to Use The Free Template

In typical Josh Can Help style, let’s walk through how to get this little guy to do what you want.

I use [[double square brackets]] around the text that needs to be changed in the file so it’s easy to find all the meta (unseen on the page) information. To add new links and change the information, you’ll want to have a bit of experience with HTML but, at the risk of a flood of new web developers taking all my clients, I’ll let you in on a little secret: HTML isn’t that hard.

So, let’s customize this page:

• Unzip the package somewhere on your desktop and open the “index.html” file with a plain text editor. If you’re in Windows, you’ll need to right-click the file and pick Notepad.
• Start scanning for double brackets and fill in the information as needed. Make sure the <title> text has words that tell search engines what you’ve got going on the page. Fill out those meta tags too, just because.
• Unless you’re familiar with CSS, just leave everything between the <style> and </style> tags alone. If you are familiar with CSS, go crazy!
• The <h1> tag, by default, is invisible but still fill it out with a short (few words) description of the page. This combined with the <title> tag helps search engines figure out the main purpose of your page. If you aren’t going to use a banner image, then delete id=”page-name” and your header is now big, bold text.
• Now, your header image. This image is centered on the page and can be any size you want. Just put the filename of the image you’re going to use after src=” and make sure the image is placed in the same directory on your host as this file. Type in a description of the image as well while you’re at it.
• For the story of the day, do the same thing with the image and add your text where indicated in the template. The image will resize to 200 pixels wide automatically. FYI on the image, just delete the whole img tag if you don’t want to use one. You can also change “Story of the day” to something else and use that space for something different.
• Now, you’re ready to plug in your links. Each link is in its own <li> tag to keep them on their own line and to give a little space in between. Just replace the text after href=” with the direct URL (including http:// ) and replace the next set of brackets with the text you want to appear on the page. You’ll notice that the first link in the left column has a paragraph right after it but before the closing tag. Make sure to follow this syntax to keep the spacing kosher.
• Want to add another link? Just copy and paste one of those <li> … </li> rows wherever you want it to be. Deleting a link is the opposite.
• Add a new separating header with <h3>. .. </h3> tags wherever you’d like (but, of course, within one of the columns).
• Want to add a separator line? Figure out where it should go and stick an <hr> right there.
• img tags can also be used in columns, just make sure they are in between the <li> and </li> tags. Style wise, it’s probably better to put img tags in between the <li> and the <a> tags.
• Scroll down to the bottom for the footer links. Don’t want any? Just delete them all except mine :).

And that’s it! To make it live, just copy index.html to a public folder on your web host and check it out. If you already have a website going, be careful where you put this so you don’t overwrite the main site file.

< Update 2024-01-15 >

I uploaded this template and an old, dynamic version to GitHub .

< Take Action >

Go to github.com › Suggest changes on GitHub ›

Comment via:

Email › GitHub ›

Subscribe via:

< read more >.

Oct 20, 2009

Is having your own website a dated concept

For the record, this is one of the reasons I find immense value in Twitter: exposure to a broad range of opinions on an equally broad range of topics. Since this particular option pertained to what I do, I figured I’d chime in.

Oct 09, 2009

Recommended reading for web site owners

These are must-reads for anyone who has or thinks they should have a website out there and gathering eyeballs.

• For Quick Inquiries
• +971 4 514 4745
• +971 52 905 2719
• [email protected]

Website Designing Lessons from Drudge Report

Techpreneur’s branding checklist.

A Palette of 10 Visually Impactful Websites for Improving Website Color Schemes

Web is quite a new place to draw history from and learn from there. However, there are some websites that have successfully established a legacy in such a rapidly evolving environment of the web. Drudge Report is one such website that has been holding up the standard since the beginning of its time and is still doing pretty good. In fact, it tops the list. Founded in 1996 by Matt Drudge, it started off as a subscriber-based dispatch.

But what makes a website like Drudge Report, with an outdated feel, one of the best designed news sites that has ever lived?

The trouble is understanding the fundamentals of design and what it really stands for. Instead of it just being pretty with glossy buttons and a colorful theme with great hues, there are other things that makes a design create relevance to the purpose of its existence.

On the basis of its core functionality and usability, Drudge Report is nailing all those skeptical looks with the following web design development tactics that are simple.

Timeless Design

A lot many people talk about timelessness of the design but they are unable to pull it off. Drudge Report has perfectly pulled off this aspect by ensuring the staying power is there without being time stamped. The ALL CAPS headlines have been surviving each and every trend and era, design do’s and don’ts. It is neither old, nor new, it’s just Drudge with black and white monospaced font and a generic list of links.

Good Clutter

Drudge ensures that headlines are always ALL CAPS but are sometimes italicized and if there’s something big that’s happening, the infamous siren warns you. Then there are three columns containing headlines only some of which have photos with them and some that don’t. If a particular headline is sensational or controversial, it will be colored in red. Not to forget the big ad right on top of the website, with others sprinkling down as you scroll down. Stories aren’t even grouped which makes it all the more interesting as your eye darts around for something interesting as you wander and make random discoveries.

Renowned Brand Name

Everybody knows “Drudge” because of the efforts of the site to have developed a renowned brand name throughout these years. It is always the first to break the stories and often becomes a source for news reporters to check what’s going on. Also the design is absolutely unique that beats all other design and development elements of the news site. This creates a massive recognizable brand. More news websites could learn How to Create a Strong Brand Identity Design from Drudge.

Easier to Maintain & Manage

The website is overall super easy to maintain as there is no fancy CMS, rather no CMS at all. Edited by hand, the overheads are minimal, say thousands in a year, but provides even greater returns, say millions in a year. To add to the wise approach, Matt Drudge himself runs the website with one other guy who happens to be a part-time contributor. Since the design is overall simple and it’s a one-page website, there are less people required and minimum technology utilized.

Drudge Report is a website that consists of one page only. Each visitor is directed to and is completely focused upon one page only, zero distractions. By doing so, Drudge ensured that there’s zero load time and no buffering. One page with three columns comprising of pieces of news that reveals instant content. This makes it Google-fast – impressive, isn’t it?

Breaking News Actually Feels Like Breaking News

Breaking news on any other news website could be just anything, even unimportant matters that sometimes people would care least about. Breaking news, however, on Drudge Report is really a breaking news that you just want to know more about. It’s newsworthy.

Now you know what Drudge Report did what others didn’t. The way all the content, load times and overall UX has been affixed in this website is simple yet inspiring. Grab on to these lessons to apply in your designs and spread the word!

Mariya Sabeen

Related posts.

Best Design Practices to Creating a Winning Website in 2024

80 Drudge Report Alternatives Ranked in November 2021

The Drudge Report was once an iconic news aggregator among conservative news sites loved by conservatives. It lost that love in 2020 and 2021 with it’s turn to the political left. Many a Drudge Report Alternative have stepped up to fill the void.

Top 27 Alternatives to the Drudge Report as Ranked by SimilarWeb.com

1) citizenfreepress.com (US Rank 845)

Total Monthly Visits in October 9.63M

Avg. Visit Duration 20m29s

2) populist.press (US Rank 2814) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 4.96M

Avg. Visit Duration 6m6s

3) thelibertydaily.com (US Rank 4653) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 2.88M

Avg. Visit Duration 23m10s

4) revolver.news (US Rank 5894)

TMV in October 3.54M

Avg. Visit Duration 3m55s

5) whatfinger.com (US Rank 6248)

TMV in October 2.65M

Avg. Visit Duration 5m56s

6) bonginoreport.com (US Rank 6721)

TMV in October 2.86M

Avg. Visit Duration 2m21s

7) trends.gab.com

TMV in October 2.33M

Avg. Visit Duration 1m14s

#) offthepress.com (US Rank 11456) started up late July 2021 by a former Drudge Report Editor)

TMV in October 993.1K

Avg. Visit Duration 34m22s

8) lucianne.com (US Rank 11951)

TMV in October 1.33M

Avg. Visit Duration 4m49s

9) protrumpnews.com (US Rank 11988) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 1.37M

Avg. Visit Duration 29m37s

10) tatumreport.com (US Rank 17354)

TMV in October 857K

Avg. Visit Duration 2m14s

11) rantingly.com (US Rank 21005) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 785.8K

Avg. Visit Duration 3m7s

12) newswars.com (US Rank 33925) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 476.04K

Avg. Visit Duration 2m1s

13) noahreport.com (US Rank 36641) Website design similar to Drudge Report.

TMV in October 215.54K

Avg. Visit Duration 1hr14m46s

14) knewz.com (US Rank 42689)

TMV in October 326.99K

Avg. Visit Duration 32s

15) 1stheadlines.com/conservative.htm (US Rank 70862)

TMV in October 256.68K

Avg. Visit Duration 2m9s

16 ) conservagator.com ( US Rank 96784 )

TMV in October 102.23K

Avg. Visit Duration 4m7s

17 ) news.infogalactic.com ( US Rank 145653 )

TMV in October 329.7K

Avg. Visit Duration 4m57s

18 ) uncanceled.news ( US Rank 145737 )

TMV in October 70.56K

Avg. Visit Duration 56s

19) badblue.bitnamiapp.com/trendr8.htm

TMV in October 102.10K

Avg. Visit Duration 40m24s

20) conservativeplaylist.com (US Rank 169312)

TMV in October 62.64K

Avg. Visit Duration 1m39s

21) thelibertymill.com (US Rank 188703)

TMV in October 81.1K

Avg. Visit Duration 3m44s

22) conservativenewsdaily.net (US Rank 191469)

TMV in October 66.47K

23 ) libertyunyielding.com/category/web-crawler/ ( US Rank 196780 )

TMV in October <50K

Avg. Visit Duration 1m9s

24 ) nationandstate.com ( US Rank 237073 )

TMV in October 75.54K

Avg. Visit Duration 25s

25) newsammo.com (US Rank 291634)

TMV in October 74.05K

Avg. Visit Duration 5m28s

26 ) populistrevolt.com ( US Rank 447471 )

Avg. Visit Duration 2m35s

Top 27 Alternatives to Drudge Report Ranked by Avg. Visit Duration

1) noahreport.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

2) badblue.bitnamiapp.com/trendr8.htm

#) offthepress.com

3) protrumpnews.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

4) thelibertydaily.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

5) citizenfreepress.com

6) populist.press Website design similar to Drudge Report.

7) whatfinger.com

8) newsammo.com

9 ) news.infogalactic.com

10) lucianne.com

11 ) conservagator.com

12) revolver.news

13) thelibertymill.com

14) rantingly.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

15 ) populistrevolt.com

16) bonginoreport.com

17) tatumreport.com

18) 1stheadlines.com/conservative.htm

19) conservativenewsdaily.net

20) newswars.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

21) conservativeplaylist.com

22) trends.gab.com

23 ) libertyunyielding.com/category/web-crawler/

24 ) uncanceled.news

25) knewz.com

26 ) nationandstate.com

53 Conservative Alternatives to the Drudge Report Listed A-Z

(SimilarWeb.com lacks enough data to rank any of the sites below)

am1.news/channel/qwiket

breakingalltherules.org

coneofsilence.us

conservativeangle.com

conservativehomepage.com

conservativenewsdirect.com

conservativenewslinks.com

conservatives.today Website design similar to Drudge Report.

dissentwatch.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

drudge-report.net

effdrudge.com

e-militia.com

freedomofthepress.com

gopfeed.com

governmentslaves.news

headlines360.news

justtherealnews.com Your place for unfiltered Government documents, releases, and statements

kindaawesome.net/politics/moderate-conservative

kindaawesome.net/politics/very-conservative

newsforchristians.com

newslinks.net

newslookup.com/politics/Right

nrreport.com

onlyconservativenews.com

planetfreemedia.com

politipage.blogspot.com

politipage.us

realnewsfeed.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

redoubtreport.com Website design similar to Drudge Report.

resist.se/newsdb.php subscription based

rodericke.com/aggregator/Sources

rightreport.com

rightwingminute.com

runehammer.com/aggregator/Sources

speedtheshift.org

stateoftoday.com

thebias.org

the-manumitter.com

therightnews.ca

therightskew.com

therightup.news

thestandardssc.org/national-News-Feeds

the-trumpian.com

tidyreport.com

unionblast.com

usefulinfonation.com/conservative-blogs

ussareport.com

veraciticity.com

watchmanreport.org

wethepeopleinsider.com

worldviewreport.com

Additional Lists for Curious News Readers

NEW! Top 24 Drudge Report Alternatives Ranked 3 Ways in January 2022

NEW! Political Memes | 23 Conservative Memes Websites Vetted – cinternet.org

NEW! Satire | 14 Political Satire Websites – All Conservative – cinternet.org

NEW!   Trump News| Best Sources Ranked | + The Good, The Bad, & … – cinternet.org

Top 100 Conservative Websites & News Sites Ranked in January 2022 – cinternet.org

Top 300+ Conservative News Sites Ranked in January 2022 – cinternet.org

NEW! 172 Conservative News Sites Covering Individual US States (all 50 covered) – cinternet.org

364 Conservative Youtubers, Rumblers, & Bitchuters Ranked via Subscriber Count in January 2022 – cinternet.org

55 Conservative Social Media Sites: Top 21 Ranked in August 2021 – cinternet.org

NEW!   Conservative News Sites Around The World | 36 Conservative Websites (non-US) – cinternet.org

NEW!   Military News | Top 22 Sites Ranked from SimilarWeb.com data – cinternet.org

23 Conservative Comedians Free on Youtube, Rumble, & Bitchute – cinternet.org

40 Black Conservatives on Youtube & Rumble – cinternet.org

11 Conservative News Channels Available on either Cable, Satellite, Apps, Internet, or some combination thereof – cinternet.org

25 Conservative Forums – cinternet.org

Top 11 Police News Sites – cinternet.org

Visit our home page at CINTERNET.org , for many more pages of conservative news niches..

New! The Fedsurrection | A News Aggregation to Share March 10, 2023 thru September 25, 2021 Stay on top of all news “Fedsurrection” by reading this new page.

Bonus News Aggregator

watchingamerica.com uses international sources, providing news and views about the United States published in other countries. The site is designed to keep Americans more knowledgeable as to how different parts of the world view them, regardless of viewpoint’s accuracy.

Additional Conservative Niche Pages From Cinternet.org that may interest you:

• Top 100 Conservative Websites & News Sites Ranked in February 2022
• Top 30 Conservative News Sites Ranked 3 Ways in January 2022
• Top 30 Conservative News Sites Ranked 4 Ways in January 2022
• Top 100 Conservative News Sites by Global & US Alexa Ratings in January 2022
• Top 100 Conservative Websites & News Sites by Alexa Global & US Rating in January 2022
• Top 300+ Conservative News Sites Ranked in January 2022
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• Political Memes | 23 Conservative Memes Websites Vetted
• Satire | 14 Conservative Satire Websites Aggregated by Cinternet.org
• Trump News| Best Sources Ranked | + The Good, The Bad, & …
• 175 Conservative News Sites Specializing in an Individual US State (all 50 States covered)
• Conservative News Sites Around The World | 37 Conservative Websites (non-US)
• Military News | Top 23 Sites Ranked from SimilarWeb.com data
• 23 Conservative Comedians Free on Youtube, Rumble, & Bitchute
• 40 Black Conservatives on Youtube & Rumble
• Top 11 Police News Sites
• 25 Conservative Forums
• Conservative Social Media | 55 Platforms | Top 28 Ranked in January 2022
• Drudge Report Changed, 80 Conservative Drudge Alternatives – 2021 Nov
• Top 24 Alternatives to Drudge Report Ranked 3 Ways in January 2022
• Political Cartoons From 20 Conservative Sites | 36 Conservative Cartoonists | Listed A-Z
• 5 Conservative Education Youtube Channels
• Resources For Conservative Activists
• Conservative Activist Organizations
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• 364 Conservative Youtubers, Rumblers, & Bitchuters Ranked by Subscriber Count in 2022

Drudge Report

The Drudge Report (stylized in all caps as DRUDGE REPORT ) is a U.S.-based news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge , [4] and run with the help of Charles Hurt [2] and Daniel Halper . [5] The site was generally regarded as a conservative [6] [7] [8] publication, though its ownership and political leanings have been questioned following business model changes in mid-to-late 2019. [9] The site consists mainly of links to news stories from other outlets about politics, entertainment, and current events; it also has links to many columnists.

Political leanings

Business model and viewership decline, notable stories, monica lewinsky scandal, hillary clinton for president, swift boat veterans for truth, obama photo, prince harry in afghanistan, u.s. senate problems, controversial stories, errors and questions about sourcing, sidney blumenthal lawsuit, alleged john kerry intern scandal, alleged bill clinton illegitimate child, alleged heckling of republican senators by cnn reporter, oprah and sarah palin, ashley todd attack hoax, birther conspiracy theories, hillary clinton's 2016 campaign, conspiracy theories about the 2017 las vegas shooting, immigration, external links.

The Drudge Report originated in 1995 as a weekly subscriber-based email dispatch. [3] It was the first news source to break the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal to the public, after Newsweek decided to "kill the story". [10]

The Drudge Report started in 1995 as a gossip column focusing on Hollywood and Washington, D.C. [11] Matt Drudge began the email-based newsletter from an apartment in Hollywood, California , using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories, sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. In its early days Drudge maintained the website from his home in Miami Beach, Florida , with help from assistants in story selection and headline writing. His first assistant was Andrew Breitbart . [12] Breitbart, who described himself as "Matt Drudge's bitch", [13] worked the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report, [14] at the same time as running his own website, Breitbart News , which provided a conservative perspective for people in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. [15] John Ziegler has said that Drudge blocked Breitbart from posting content critical of Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign for the US presidency. [16]

In 2010, Drudge added former Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl to the Drudge Report staff. [17] In 2011, he added to the staff Charles Hurt, most recently the Washington bureau chief of the New York Post and a columnist for The Washington Times . [2] Curl, who served as morning shift editor, left the site in 2014 and, with Drudge's blessing, in January 2015 launched his own aggregator Right Read , for The Washington Times . [18]

Drudge, who began his website in 1997 as a supplement to his $ 10 per year e-mail newsletter, [19] received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that Jack Kemp would be Republican Bob Dole 's running mate in the 1996 US presidential election . In 1998, Drudge made national waves when he broke the news that Newsweek magazine had information on an inappropriate relationship between "a White House intern" and President Bill Clinton —the Monica Lewinsky scandal —but was withholding publication. [20] [21] [22] After Drudge's report came out, Newsweek published the story. [23]

The Drudge Report site consists mainly of selected [24] hyperlinks to news websites all over the world, each link carrying a headline written by Drudge or his editors. The linked stories are generally hosted on the external websites of mainstream media outlets. It occasionally includes stories written by Drudge himself, usually two or three paragraphs in length. They generally concern a story about to be published in a major magazine or newspaper. Drudge occasionally publishes Nielsen , Arbitron , and BookScan ratings, or early election exit polls which are otherwise not made available to the public.

In April 2009, the Associated Press announced that it would be examining the fair use doctrine, used by sites like Google and the Drudge Report to justify the use of AP content without payment. [25]

On May 4, 2009, the US Attorney General 's office issued a warning to employees in Massachusetts not to visit the Drudge Report and other sites because of malicious code contained in some of the advertising on the website. [26] In March 2010, antivirus company Avast! warned that advertising at the Drudge Report, The New York Times , Yahoo , Google , MySpace and other sites carried malware that could infect computers. "The most compromised ad delivery platforms were Yield Manager and Fimserve, but a number of smaller ad systems, including Myspace, were also found to be delivering malware on a lesser scale," said Avast Virus Labs. [27]

The site's design has seen few changes since its debut in 1997. Drudge has experimented with temporary, relatively minor design tweaks, including using all black-and-white pictures for a period in August 2017 [28] and using colored text for holidays instead of the standard black throughout the site's existence; in all cases, the basic layout remained consistent throughout its existence. [ citation needed ] It remains entirely written in unscripted HTML , with a mostly monochromatic color scheme of black boldface monospaced font text on a plain white background. The Drudge Report has been described by Cheryl Woodard, co-founder of PC , Macworld , PC World and Publish magazines, as "a big, haphazard mishmash of links and photos" [29] and by Dan Rahmel as "popular despite a plain appearance". [30] The Drudge Report website is simple and, according to Paul Armstrong of webwithoutwords.com , retro in feel. [31] Jason Fried of Basecamp called it "one of the best designed sites on the web". [32] It consists of a banner headline and a number of other selected headlines in three columns in monospaced font . Most link to an outside source, usually the online edition of a newspaper, which hosts the story. When no such source is available, either because the story is "developing", [33] with little known details at the time, or is an exclusive scoop, a special page is created on the Drudge Report servers, which contains text and sometimes images.

Stories on the site are ascribed different levels of importance, which Matt Drudge rates at his editorial discretion. The Report almost always holds one major story above the masthead logo, usually just one sentence hyperlinked to the most important story of the day. Other stories surrounding the main headline can be found in the upper left-hand side of the page and link to more specific articles dealing with aspects of the headline story. The standard story, either the headline or links below the logo, is written in black. The majority of stories are laid out in three columns beneath the masthead ; at the bottom of each column are various links: newspapers and magazines in the left column, columnists in the middle column, and a collection of wire service links and miscellaneous links to archives, e-mail, site stats, and a box to submit anonymous tips at the right. "Weather Action," a static page of links to weather data; and "Quake Sheet," with earthquake monitoring, each have their own hosted page on the Drudge Report servers. The newest stories and those Drudge considers most important are in red, all under a single major headline in large bold type. For especially important breaking stories, especially if they are still emerging, Drudge places art of a flashing red light on the screen. [34]

Although the site initially featured very few images, it is now usually illustrated with five or six photographs. Generally the images, like the linked headlines, are hotlinked from the servers of other news agencies. [ citation needed ]

Matt Drudge has said that he is a conservative , but "more of a populist ". [35] [36] Some had regarded the Drudge Report as conservative in tone, [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] and it has been referred to in the media as "a conservative news aggregator". [43] In 2008, Richard Siklos, an editor of Fortune magazine, called the Drudge Report a "conservative bullhorn". [44] Peter Wallsten, writing in the Los Angeles Times , labeled Drudge a "well-known conservative warrior"; [45] Saul Hansell, writing in The New York Times , referred to him as a "conservative muckraker"; [46] and Glenn Greenwald was quoted in New York magazine in August 2007 as calling him a "right-wing hack ". [47]

Jesse Swick of The New Republic notes that the Drudge Report frequently links to stories that cast doubt upon global warming. "[Drudge] loves a press release from Senator Inhofe almost as much as he loves taking pot shots at Al Gore ... It's like flashing tasty images of popcorn and sodas between frames at movie theaters, only much less subtle." [48] Ben Shapiro wrote, "The American left can't restrict Internet usage or ban talk radio, so it de-legitimizes these news sources. Ripping alternative news sources as illegitimate is the left's only remaining option—it cannot compete with the right wing in the new media ... They call Matt Drudge a muckraker and a yellow journalist ." [49]

A study in 2005 placed the Drudge Report "slightly left of center". [50] "One thing people should keep in mind is that our data for the Drudge Report was based almost entirely on the articles that the Drudge Report lists on other Web sites", said Timothy Groseclose , the head of the study. "Very little was based on the stories that Matt Drudge himself wrote. The fact that the Drudge Report appears left of center is merely a reflection of the overall bias of the media." [50] Professor Mark Liberman critiqued the statistical model used in this study on the basis that model assumed conservative politicians do not care about the ideological position of think tanks they cite, while liberal politicians do. [51] [52] The study was also criticized by media watchdog Spinwatch for its methodology and its authors' ties to conservative think tanks . [53]

In 2015 and 2016, Drudge repeatedly featured pro-Trump headlines during the Republican Party presidential primaries , leading Salon and Politico to describe Drudge as "all in" for Trump. [54] [55] During the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump of 2019, the Drudge Report began aggregating what CNN Business called "an overwhelming amount of negative news for the Trump White House". CNN speculated that this meant there had been a falling out. [56] In 2019, Rasmussen Reports reported that Matt Drudge had sold the site and was no longer involved in its operations, which would also explain the change in editorial direction; however, that reporting was not confirmed. [1] [57] By 2020, some prominent conservatives—including President Donald Trump —had concluded that the Drudge Report had abandoned its conservative ideology, with Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson stating, "Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive left." [58] In 2020, Austrian social scientist Christian Fuchs of the University of Westminster described the Drudge Report as an alt-right website. [59]

Matt Drudge's business entity in Florida is a privately owned limited liability company called Digital, LLC. [60] [61] [62] Drudge applied for and was granted a U.S. Trademark registration for the phrase "Drudge Report" on January 15, 2019, filed on May 15, 2018. [63] [64] The registration excludes the word "Report" from protection outside of the exact two-word phrase use and is for "standard characters without claim to any particular font style, size, or color."

Revenue for the Drudge Report is driven by advertising that was managed for 20 years by Intermarkets, Inc. During the summer of 2019, after many years of being known for "changing nothing" about the website, Drudge advertising shifted to a new company by the name of Granite Cubed. The current ownership, strategy and outlook for the Drudge Report is held close as private information. [65]

In October 2019, the Drudge Report began linking to articles which were increasingly critical of Trump, reportedly the result of Drudge himself becoming "exasperated" by the president. [66] This coincided with a near 30% decrease in traffic metrics for the Drudge website in the last months of 2019 — from a 90 day-ago ranking of #637 in global internet engagement as of July to #844 in December. [67] The site's readership briefly rebounded in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic escalated, but continued to decline to new record lows as the year went on. [68]

After a Comscore data report showing a year over year decline of 38 percent from August 2019 to August 2020, President Trump tweeted, "Such an honor! Drudge is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he's bleeding profusely, and is no longer "hot". But others are! Lost ALL Trumpers." [69]

In 2006, Mark Halperin wrote that "Drudge's coverage affects the media's political coverage", effectively steering it towards what Halperin calls "the most salacious aspects of American politics". [70] In The Way To Win , a book written by Halperin and John Harris , Drudge is called "the Walter Cronkite of his era". [70] [71] Democratic Party strategist Chris Lehane also said in 2006 "phones start ringing" whenever Drudge breaks a story, and Mark McKinnon , a former media advisor to George W. Bush , said that he checked the site 30–40 times per day. [70]

Wallsten analyzed the data derived from a detailed content analysis of print, broadcast and blog discussions during the last five weeks of the 2008 campaign. Rather than the broad impact posited by professional political observers, Wallsten found that, even on issues where the site should be expected to have its largest impact, the stories highlighted on the Drudge Report exert a fairly inconsistent influence over what traditional media outlets chose to cover. Specifically, the time series analysis presented by Wallsten shows evidence of a "Drudge effect" on print and broadcast coverage for only five of the 10 political scandals that received the most attention on the Drudge Report between September 30 and November 3, 2008. [72]

Matt Drudge has been criticized by other media news personalities: Bill O'Reilly twice called Drudge a "threat to democracy" in response to Drudge disclosing his book sales figures, [73] and Keith Olbermann referred to Drudge as "an idiot with a modem". [74]

Drudge, along with his website, was labeled one of the "Top 10 anti-Barack Obama conservatives" by the US editor of The Daily Telegraph in February 2009. [75]

In addition to its media influence, the Drudge Report has influenced design elements on other sites, some with opposing viewpoints [76] and some which use the same format for listing news. A left-leaning [77] parody site called Drudge Retort was founded in 1998 as "a send-up of Mr. Drudge's breathless style". [78] [79] [80] According to online analytics data for April 2010 from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, the Drudge Report was then—now over ten years ago—the number one site referrer for all online UK commercial newspaper websites. [81]

The Drudge Report originally attained prominence when it was the first to report what came to be known as the Lewinsky scandal . It published the story on January 17, 1998, showing that Newsweek had turned down the story. [82]

In October 2007, during the early months of the Democratic primary for the 2008 presidential campaign, the Drudge Report broke a story, "Queen of the Quarter: Hillary Crushes Obama in Surprise Fund-Raising Surge," and, "$27 Million, Sources Tell Drudge Report." The New York Times said, "Within minutes, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's fund-raising success was injected via Drudge into the day's political news on the Internet and cable television." [83]

During the 2004 US presidential campaign, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group made claims about John Kerry 's war record, which were mentioned by Drudge and investigated by major newspapers and TV networks. [70] The book Unfit for Command: Swiftboat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry became a best-seller in part due to its promotion in the Drudge Report.

Drudge [84] published a photo of Barack Obama in Somali tribal dress on February 25, 2008, [85] and reported that the photo had been sent to him by a Clinton campaign staffer. [86] The publication of the photograph resulted in a brief war of words between the Clinton and Obama campaign organizations.

On February 28, 2008, Drudge published an article noting that Prince Harry was serving with his regiment in Afghanistan . Prince Harry was ten weeks into a front-line deployment in Afghanistan that was subject to a voluntary news blackout by the UK press. [87] The blackout was designed to protect Prince Harry and the men serving with him from being specifically targeted by the Taliban . An Australian weekly women's magazine New Idea had broken the story in January, [88] but it was not followed up at the time. The New Idea editors claimed ignorance of any news blackout. [89] Then a German newspaper Berliner Kurier published a short piece on February 28, also before Drudge. [90]

Drudge subsequently claimed the report as an exclusive. Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt , professional head of the British Army, said: "I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us". [91] The Prince's tour of duty was prematurely ended, since his unit might have been targeted by large-scale suicide attacks intended to kill the Prince. [92]

On March 9, 2010, The Senate Sergeant-at-Arms claimed that the site was "responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate...Please avoid using [this] site until the Senate resolves this issue...The Senate has been swamped the last couples [ sic ] days with this issue." The Drudge Report countered stating that "it served more than 29 million pages Monday without an e-mail complaint about 'pop ups,' or the site serving 'viruses'." [93]

Research by the media magazine Brill's Content in 1998 cast doubt on the accuracy of the majority of the "exclusives" claimed by the Drudge Report. Of the 51 stories claimed as exclusives from January to September 1998, the magazine found that 31 (61%) were truly exclusive stories. Of those, 32% were untrue, 36% were true and the remaining 32% were of debatable accuracy. [22]

In 1997, the Drudge Report reported that incoming White House assistant Sidney Blumenthal may have been perpetrating domestic violence . Drudge retracted the story the next day and apologized, saying that he was given bad information, but Blumenthal filed a $30 million libel lawsuit, Blumenthal v. Drudge , in the District of Columbia. After four years, Blumenthal dropped his lawsuit, saying that the suit had cost him tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. He agreed to pay $2,500 to Drudge's Los Angeles attorney for travel costs, claiming that Drudge was "backed by unlimited funds from political supporters who use a tax-exempt foundation." [94] [95] [96] The Individual Rights Foundation, led by conservative activist David Horowitz , paid Drudge's legal fees in the Blumenthal lawsuit. Judge Paul Friedman, a Bill Clinton appointee, noted in the judgment that Drudge "is not a reporter, a journalist, or a newsgatherer. He is, as he admits himself, simply a purveyor of gossip." [97]

During the 2004 presidential campaign , the Drudge Report ran a story in which general Wesley Clark claimed that the John Kerry campaign would implode over an intern affair. The Drudge Report reported that other news outlets were investigating the alleged affair, but removed it from the site shortly afterward when the other news outlets dropped their investigations. [98]

In 1999, the Drudge Report announced that it had viewed a videotape which was the basis of a Star magazine and Hard Copy story. Under the headline, "Woman Names Bill Clinton Father Of Son In Shocking Video Confession", Drudge reported a videotaped "confession" by a former prostitute who claimed that her son was fathered by Bill Clinton . [99] After a paternity test using a sample of Clinton's DNA found on the dress belonging to Monica Lewinsky , a Star source told Time magazine that "there was no match, not even close." [100] Drudge reported these findings in 1999, but during the 2016 presidential election Drudge revived the story that the child, Danney Williams , then a 30 year old man, really was Clinton's illegitimate son by twisting established facts. [101]

On April 1, 2007, the Drudge Report cited an unnamed "official" source claiming that CNN reporter Michael Ware had "heckled" Republican senators McCain and Graham during a live press conference: [102]

An official at the press conference called Ware's conduct "outrageous," saying, "here you have two United States Senators in Baghdad giving first-hand reports while Ware is laughing and mocking their comments. I've never witnessed such disrespect. This guy is an activist not a reporter." —   Matthew Drudge, Drudge Report

However, a video hosted by Rawstory showed that Ware did not make a sound nor ask any question during the press conference. [103]

On September 5, 2008, the Drudge Report reported that The Oprah Winfrey Show staffers were "sharply divided on the merits of booking Sarah Palin." Drudge said that he had obtained the information from an anonymous source. Winfrey responded in a written statement to news outlets by saying, "The item in today's Drudge Report is categorically untrue. There has been absolutely no discussion about having Sarah Palin on my show. At the beginning of this presidential campaign when I decided that I was going to take my first public stance in support of a candidate, I made the decision not to use my show as a platform for any of the candidates." Oprah Winfrey's public statement came after she had already endorsed Barack Obama for president on Larry King Live in 2007. [104] Drudge was accused by some commentators of planting a false story for political ends. [105]

On October 23, 2008, the Drudge Report published an unconfirmed exclusive story regarding Ashley Todd , a 20-year-old employee [106] [107] of the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) and John McCain volunteer who had allegedly been attacked by a black male for having a McCain sticker on her car in Pittsburgh . The story was reported without a link but as "developing", with the headline "Shock: McCain Volunteer Attacked and Mutilated in Pittsburgh – 'B' carved into 20 yr old Woman's Face." [108] The story set off a "storm of media attention" [106] and was repeated by some conservative bloggers and radio talk-show hosts, all citing the Drudge Report as their source. It was also reported in newspapers and on television around the world. [109] The story was confirmed to be a hoax perpetrated by Todd and, according to Talking Points Memo , spread to reporters by McCain's Pennsylvania communications director. [110]

The Drudge Report printed a retraction, including links to the news stories detailing that the attack had been a hoax, and that Todd had performed a similar "attack" on herself while volunteering in a local Ron Paul grassroots group. She was later asked to leave the group because of the hoax.

The Drudge Report included some articles intimating that U.S. president Barack Obama was not an American citizen. [111]

On August 8, 2016, the Drudge Report displayed a photo depicting two men helping Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton ascend a set of stairs during a campaign stop in South Carolina on February 27, 2016. Afterward, several Twitter accounts in support of Republican nominee Donald Trump used the photo with the hashtag #HillaryHealth. [112] The use of the photo was criticized by several commentators [ by whom? ] for presenting a dated photograph out of context to mislead readers. [113] [114]

On October 3, 2016, the Drudge Report published a dubious claim that Bill Clinton had an illegitimate child named Danney Williams, an allegation that the site had reported as debunked in 1999 based on a Time magazine article. [115]

On December 30, 2016, an article listed on the Drudge Report accused the United States federal government of attempting to bring down its website with a denial-of-service attack . [116] [117] Beginning roughly one week earlier, DDoS attacks had repeatedly taken the site offline for extended periods. Cybersecurity analysts speculated that the attack was on the scale of the 2016 Dyn cyberattack and suggested that only a small number of groups would have the ability to take down a highly trafficked site for extended lengths of time. [118]

The Drudge Report included articles about the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory , [119] as well as conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich . [120]

In October 2017, Drudge Report included articles with conspiracy theories about the 2017 Las Vegas shooting . [121]

In October 2017, the Drudge Report shared a dubious Breitbart News story claiming that an illegal alien caused the October 2017 Northern California wildfires . [122] The story was rebutted by the Sonoma County 's sheriff department, which stated, "This is completely false, bad, wrong information that Breitbart started and is being put out into the public." [122]

In June 2018, the Drudge Report displayed a headline and photo pairing that some perceived as a suggestion that migrant children who had been separated from their parents were violent criminals. The photo was actually that of a group of Syrian children holding toy guns. [123] [124] [125]

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• 1 2 3 Calderone, Michael (May 12, 2011). "Matt Drudge Hires Washington Times Columnist Charles Hurt" . The Washington Post . Retrieved May 13, 2011 .
• 1 2 Jason M Shepard (2008). "Drudge Report" . Encyclopedia of American Journalism . Taylor & Francis. pp.   146–7. ISBN   978-0-415-96950-5 .
• MacAskill, Ewen (October 3, 2012). "Conservative media release old video of Obama in so-called 'explosive' exclusive" . The Guardian . Retrieved June 27, 2016 .
• Deruy, Emily (October 18, 2012). "Why This 'Obama Phone' Ad Is Misleading" . ABC News . Retrieved July 4, 2016 .
• Rutenberg, Jim; Carter, Bill (November 7, 2001). "A Nation Challenged: The Media; Network Coverage a Target of Fire From Conservatives" . The New York Times . Retrieved April 21, 2009 .
• ↑ Gold, Hadas. "Daniel Halper joins Drudge Report" . Politico .
• ↑ Oliver Darcy (April 18, 2020). "Conservative news mogul Matt Drudge fires back at Trump, says his web traffic is at record levels" . CNN . Retrieved August 9, 2020 .
• ↑ Man, Anthony. "Has Drudge Report lost its clout in the Trump camp?" . sun-sentinel.com . Retrieved August 9, 2020 .
• ↑ "PolitiFact | Drudge Report" . www.politifact.com . Retrieved August 9, 2020 .
• "The Drudge Report Just Made A Huge Change To How It Makes Money" . BuzzFeed News . Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
• "Et tu, Drudge? Alarm grows on right over site's anti-Trump pivot" . The Washington Times . Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
• Suebsaeng, Asawin (November 23, 2019). "Trump Privately Frets 'What's Going on With Drudge?' During Impeachment, Asks Jared Kushner to 'Look Into It' " . Retrieved January 13, 2020 .
• Man, Anthony. "Has Drudge Report lost its clout in the Trump camp?" . sun-sentinel.com . Retrieved April 7, 2020 .
• ↑ "Scandalous scoop breaks online" . BBC News . January 25, 1998 . Retrieved June 23, 2007 .
• ↑ "Blumenthal vs Drudge" . Retrieved December 18, 2006 .
• ↑ Sappell, Joel (August 4, 2007). "Hot links served up daily" . Los Angeles Times . Archived from the original on February 11, 2008 . Retrieved August 4, 2007 .
• ↑ "Lists: What's Your Source for That? Where Andrew Breitbart gets his information" . ReasonOnline.com. October 2, 2007 . Retrieved October 1, 2008 .
• ↑ "Andrew Breitbart: Drudge's Human Face" . Gawker.com. Archived from the original on September 9, 2008 . Retrieved September 10, 2008 .
• ↑ "Hollywood Infidel" . Observer.com . September 8, 2008 . Retrieved October 1, 2008 .
• ↑ Ziegler, John (March 7, 2012). Matt Drudge Intentionally Ignored Negative Stories to Help Elect Barack Obama Archived March 18, 2012, at the Wayback Machine . News release . Retrieved March 9, 2012.
• ↑ Dornic, Matt (November 2, 2010). "Curl's Secret Gig with Drudge" . www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc . Retrieved April 26, 2011 .
• ↑ Calderone, Michael (January 5, 2015). Former Drudge Report Editor Launches Politics-Focused Site 'Right Read' . HuffPost . Retrieved January 6, 2015.
• ↑ "Profile: Matt Drudge   – Webmaster of pork pies   – Scotland on Sunday" . scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com. Archived from the original on March 29, 2008 . Retrieved March 13, 2009 .
• ↑ Drudge, Matt (January 17, 1998). "Newsweek Kills Story On White House Intern" . The Drudge Report. Archived from the original on September 1, 2006 . Retrieved October 5, 2006 .
• ↑ Johnson, Glen (January 23, 1998). "Newsweek got, held scoop on Clinton story" . AP/Denver Rocky Mountain News . Retrieved April 5, 2007 . [ dead link ]
• 1 2 McClintick, David (November 1998). "Town Crier for the New Age" . Brill's Content. Archived from the original on August 19, 2000 . Retrieved July 23, 2010 .
• ↑ Fineman, Howard; Karen Breslau (February 2, 1998). "Sex, Lies and the President" . Newsweek . Retrieved April 5, 2007 .
• ↑ Carole A., Levitt; Mark E. Rosch (2006). The lawyer's guide to fact finding on the Internet . American Bar Association. p.   198. ISBN   978-1-59031-671-9 . Along with the links comes Drudge's own (conservative) opinions on the news stories he chooses to highlight.
• ↑ Sarno, David (April 7, 2009). "Associated Press accuses online news outlets of 'misappropriation' " . Los Angeles Times . Retrieved April 8, 2009 .
• ↑ "U.S. Attorney's office tells employees not to log on to Drudge Report" . Politico . Retrieved May 16, 2009 .
• ↑ "Malware delivered by Yahoo, Fox, Google ads" . CNET . Archived from the original on June 3, 2010 . Retrieved April 15, 2010 .
• ↑ Allen, Mike (August 10, 2017). "Inside Drudge's new look" . Axios . Retrieved August 10, 2017 .
• ↑ Woodard, Cheryl; Lucia Hwang (2007). Every nonprofit's guide to publishing . Nolo. p.   185. ISBN   978-1-4133-0658-3 .
• ↑ Rahmel, Dan (2007). Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional . Apress. p.   217. ISBN   978-1-59059-848-1 .
• ↑ "The Drudge Report" . webwithoutwords.com. Archived from the original on January 30, 2009 . Retrieved April 13, 2009 . Drudge Report succeeds in having that web "retro" feel of something stuck in the early 90s
• ↑ "Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web" . www.37signals.com . Retrieved April 13, 2009 .
• ↑ "A Touching Moment (washingtonpost.com)" . www.washingtonpost.com . July 15, 2004 . Retrieved April 13, 2009 . The next day, Matt Drudge followed suit with his own 'developing' Kerry-Edwards 'story' titled, 'Can't keep hands off each other.'
• ↑ Malone, Michael S. (March 1, 2007). "Silicon Insider: Surfing Upstream" . ABC News . Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 . Retrieved July 4, 2016 . On a given day, the Drudge Report may contain thirty or forty sentence-long headlines, the most important ones in red, all under a single major headline in large bold type. On the really big breaking stories, especially the ones still emerging, Drudge will even post a flashing siren on the screen. {{ cite news }} : CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link )
• ↑ The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power Random House Digital 2007, page 72
• ↑ Sokol, Brett (June 28, 2001). "The Drudge Retort" . Miami New Times . Archived from the original on August 29, 2005 . Retrieved November 1, 2006 . Matt Drudge: "I am a conservative"
• ↑ "Liberal media's voice grows stronger" . Crainsnewyork.com. October 11, 2008 . Retrieved March 19, 2009 . On the Web, The Huffington Post has become a leading news and opinion site just three years after launching. Modeled after conservative news aggregator The Drudge Report"
• ↑ "Will a funny thing happen on the way to Washington?" . Edward Luce . The Financial Times. October 21, 2008. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022 . Retrieved October 29, 2008 . ...the conservative Drudge Report...
• ↑ "McCain labels Obama 'the redistributor' " . Stephen Dinan . The Washington Times . Retrieved October 29, 2008 . ..the conservative Drudge Report...
• ↑ "MoveOn.org Targets AP's Fournier for Alleged Pro-McCain Bias" . Editor and Publisher (pay site) . Retrieved September 10, 2008 . ...the Drudge Report ....and numerous other conservative sites
• ↑ "Drudge Retort Considers Lawsuit Against AP" . MediaPost NY. Archived from the original on March 4, 2009 . Retrieved December 9, 2008 . ...the conservative Drudge Report
• ↑ "A weekly look at what's getting the most looks online" . The Topeka Capital-Journal . Archived from the original on March 21, 2009 . Retrieved December 9, 2008 . ...the Drudge Report, a popular conservative Web site.
• ↑ "Is there room for another Drudge Report?" . Washington Examiner . February 3, 2015 . Retrieved April 23, 2015 . is there a need for another conservative news aggregator? Drudge has dominated the field since the late 1990s.
• ↑ Richard Siklos (June 6, 2008). "The Web 2.0-defying logic of Drudge" . CNN . Retrieved June 28, 2008 .
• ↑ Wallsten, Peter (January 29, 2009). "New political era? Same as the old one" . Los Angeles Times . Retrieved February 7, 2009 . ...well-known conservative warriors such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Matt Drudge...
• ↑ Hansell, Saul (June 16, 2008). "The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs" . New York Times . Retrieved February 21, 2009 .
• ↑ Weiss, Philip (August 24, 2007). "Watching Matt Drudge" . New York Magazine . Retrieved August 19, 2019 .
• ↑ "It's Always Snowing on the Drudge Report" . The New Republic . December 9, 2009 . Retrieved April 24, 2011 .
• ↑ "Ben Shapiro   : Left behind: the democratization of the media   — Townhall.com" . townhall.com. Archived from the original on September 7, 2008 . Retrieved April 14, 2009 .
• 1 2 "Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist   — UCLA Newsroom" . newsroom.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on March 15, 2010 . Retrieved February 28, 2010 . ...Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and the Drudge Report — were in a statistical dead heat in the race for the most centrist news outlet. Of the print media, USA Today was the most centrist.
• ↑ Liberman, Mark (December 23, 2005). "Multiplying ideologies considered harmful" . Language Log . Retrieved November 6, 2006 .
• ↑ Liberman, Mark (December 22, 2005). "Linguistics, politics, mathematics" . Language Log . Retrieved November 6, 2006 .
• ↑ "Flawed UCLA-led study on medias liberal bias" . www.spinwatch.org.uk. Archived from the original on November 1, 2010 . Retrieved March 7, 2009 .
• ↑ LaSalvia, Jimmy (December 25, 2015). "Matt Drudge might elect Donald Trump: The GOP front-runner's secret weapon is the conservative media icon" .
• ↑ "Drudge goes all in for Trump" . Politico .
• ↑ Darcy, Oliver (October 10, 2019). "Matt Drudge, an influential figure in conservative media, sours on Trump as he faces impeachment" . CNN Business . Retrieved October 27, 2019 .
• ↑ Rosen, Armin (November 24, 2020). "Matt Drudge Logs Off" . Tablet . Retrieved January 5, 2021 .
• ↑ Byrnes, Jesse (July 25, 2020). "Tucker Carlson: 'Matt Drudge is now firmly a man of the progressive left' " . TheHill .
• ↑ Fuchs, Christian (July 20, 2020). "Towards a critical theory of communication as renewal and update of Marxist humanism in the age of digital capitalism" . Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour . 50 (3): 335–356. doi : 10.1111/jtsb.12247 . ISSN   0021-8308 . S2CID   225578399 . Examples of alt-right websites are Breitbart, Drudge Report, InfoWars, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and WorldNetDaily.
• ↑ "Florida Department of State Division of Corporations - Digital, LLC" . Retrieved November 28, 2020 .
• ↑ "Florida Companies Directory - Digital, LLC" . floridacompanysearch.com . Retrieved November 28, 2020 .
• ↑ "OpenCorporates - Digital, LLC" . opencorporates.com . Retrieved November 28, 2020 .
• ↑ "U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - Drudge Report" . uspto.gov . Retrieved November 28, 2020 .
• ↑ "DRUDGE REPORT Trademark Information" . trademarkia.com . Retrieved November 28, 2020 .
• ↑ "The Drudge Report Just Made A Huge Change To How It Makes Money" . Buzzfeednews.com. August 15, 2019 . Retrieved April 23, 2020 .
• ↑ Oliver Darcy (April 18, 2020). "Conservative news mogul Matt Drudge fires back at Trump, says his web traffic is at record levels" . CNN . Retrieved November 25, 2020 .
• ↑ "Drudge Report has lost almost 30 percent of its traffic in recent months amid turn on Trump" . Disrn .
• ↑ Darcy, Oliver (April 18, 2020). "Conservative news mogul Matt Drudge fires back at Trump, says his web traffic is at record levels" . CNN . Retrieved April 23, 2020 .
• ↑ Ellefson, Lindsey (September 14, 2020). "Trump's Right: Drudge Report's Audience Is Down Nearly 40% From Last Year" . TheWrap . Retrieved September 23, 2020 .
• 1 2 3 4 "Drudge Report Sets Tone for National Political Coverage" . ABC News . October 1, 2006 . Retrieved October 1, 2006 .
• ↑ Halpernin, Mark; John F. Harris (October 2006). The Way To Win . Random House. ISBN   978-1-4000-6447-2 .
• ↑ Wallsten, Kevin (2011). "Drudge's world? The Drudge Report's influence on media coverage" . Texas. Archived from the original on October 17, 2015.
• ↑ Drudge, Matt (December 18, 2003). "Host Unhinged After Sales Figures Revealed; Calls Drudge 'Threat To Democracy' " . Drudge Report . Retrieved March 26, 2007 .
• ↑ Kurtz, Howard (September 15, 1998). "MSNBC Pundit Rises With Clinton Crises" . The Washington Post . pp.   E1 . Retrieved October 1, 2006 .
• ↑ Harnden, Toby (February 27, 2009). "Top 10 anti-Barack Obama conservatives" . London: blogs.telegraph.co.uk. Archived from the original on September 15, 2009 . Retrieved March 3, 2009 . Drudge's deft selection of links helps build a conservative case against Obama every day.
• ↑ "Drudge Retort" . 2009 . Retrieved January 24, 2009 .
• ↑ Hansell, Saul (June 16, 2008). "The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs" . New York Times . Retrieved March 21, 2009 . The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge.
• ↑ Barron, James (January 8, 1999). "Pen With Meaning" . New York Times . Retrieved October 1, 2008 .
• ↑ Kramer, Staci D. "Drudge Retort's Retort To AP: Personal Issue Resolved But 'Larger Conflict' Remains" . The Washington Post . Retrieved October 1, 2008 .
• ↑ Richtel, Matt (August 27, 1998). "From the Drudge Report To the Drudge Retort" . New York Times . Retrieved October 1, 2008 .
• ↑ Andrews, Robert (June 28, 2010). "PaidContent: where UK newspapers get their traffic" . The Guardian . Retrieved June 27, 2016 .
• ↑ "Newsweek Kills Story on White House Intern" , Drudge Report, January 17, 1998
• ↑ Rutenberg, Jim (October 22, 2007). "The Drudge Report warms to the Clinton camp, or is it vice versa?" . The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved April 6, 2022 .
• ↑ "Obama plays down photo row" . english.aljazeera.net. Archived from the original on August 4, 2008 . Retrieved March 3, 2009 .
• ↑ "Clinton Staffers Circulate 'Dressed' Obama" , Drudge Report, February 27, 2008
• ↑ Spillius, Alex (February 25, 2008). "Barack Obama tribal photo 'sent to Drudge Report by Hillary Clinton staff' " . The Daily Telegraph . London. Archived from the original on January 12, 2022 . Retrieved May 7, 2012 .
• ↑ "News black-out" . BBC News . February 29, 2008 . Retrieved March 2, 2008 .
• ↑ "New Idea defends claims it endangered Prince Harry" . The Daily Telegraph (Australia) . February 29, 2008 . Retrieved February 29, 2008 .
• ↑ "New Idea pleads ignorance on Harry embargo" . ABC Australia News. February 29, 2008 . Retrieved March 1, 2008 .
• ↑ "Frontline Harry a well-kept secret" . The West Australian . Archived from the original on March 4, 2008 . Retrieved February 29, 2008 .
• ↑ "Harry leak disappoints army chief" . BBC News . February 28, 2008 . Retrieved February 29, 2008 .
• ↑ Norton-Taylor, Richard; Gillan, Audrey (February 29, 2008). "Army prepares to evacuate Harry after news blackout fails" . The Guardian . Retrieved June 17, 2016 .
• ↑ "Senate Staffers Warned to Stay Clear of Drudge Report" . Fox News. February 28, 2008 . Retrieved March 9, 2010 .
• ↑ Kurtz, Howard (May 2, 2001). "Clinton Aide Settles Libel Suit Against Matt Drudge – at a Cost" . The Washington Post . p.   C01. Archived from the original on August 10, 2018 . Retrieved April 11, 2007 .
• ↑ Drudge, Matt (May 1, 2001). "May Day: Lawsuit Against Drudge Dropped; Blumenthal Pays Cash To Get Out!" . Drudge Report. Archived from the original on May 6, 2001 . Retrieved December 15, 2006 .
• ↑ Tim McDonald (2001). "Online Matt Drudge Libel Suit Comes to 'Wimpy Conclusion' " . Newsfactor.com. Archived from the original on August 23, 2007 . Retrieved July 30, 2007 .
• ↑ "Blumenthal vs Drudge" . Tech Law Journal. 1998 . Retrieved December 18, 2006 .
• ↑ Polier, Alexandra (June 7, 2004). "John Kerry intern scandal   – Alexandra Polier's account" . New York Magazine . Retrieved June 7, 2004 .
• ↑ Special Reports Personal Collection. Drudge Report Archives. Retrieved on April 2, 2007
• ↑ Hetherington, James (June 18, 2018). "Man Claiming to be Bill Clinton's Son Wants Second DNA Test" . Newsweek . Retrieved August 19, 2019 .
• ↑ Borchers, Callum. "Danney Williams is not Bill Clinton's son, no matter what Matt Drudge tells you" . The Washington Post . Retrieved August 19, 2019 .
• ↑ Drudge, Matt (April 2, 2007). "McCain heckled by CNN reporter" . Drudge Report . Retrieved April 2, 2007 .
• Roston, Michael; Edwards, David (April 2, 2007). "CNN reporter slams Drudge's charge that he 'heckled' McCain; Exclusive video confirms his claim" . Rawstory . Archived from the original on April 6, 2007 . Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
• Memmott, Mark (April 2, 2007). "CNN's Ware fires back at Drudge report about 'heckling' " . On Deadline (blog). USA Today . Archived from the original on October 7, 2008 . Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
• ↑ "Oprah Denies Report She's Balking at Having Palin on Show" . Fox News. September 5, 2008 . Retrieved February 20, 2009 .
• Harris, Paul (September 7, 2008). "US election: Storm as Oprah says no to Palin interview" . The Guardian . Retrieved June 27, 2016 . Some experts believe the issue, initially reported on Drudge ... was a media ploy to drag Winfrey's backing of Obama into the election and show a media bias against the Republicans
• Zeleny, Jeff (May 3, 2007). "Oprah Endorses Obama" . New York Times . Retrieved June 27, 2016 .
• 1 2 Fuoco, Michael A. (October 25, 2008). "McCain volunteer admits to hoax" . www.post-gazette.com . Retrieved March 3, 2009 . One photo appeared on The Drudge Report on Thursday, setting off a storm of media attention.
• ↑ Meg White. "Ashley Todd, PA Racist Hoax "Victim," Was Paid Organizer for College Republican National Committee, Not a Volunteer" . BuzzFlash.com. Archived from the original on October 30, 2008 . Retrieved October 29, 2008 .
• ↑ Feldman, Jeffrey (October 23, 2008). "Drudge Puts Dangerous Spin on Mugging, Implies Violence Targeting McCain Volunteers" . Huffington Post . Retrieved October 23, 2008 .
• ↑ "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" . NBC News . October 24, 2008 . Retrieved March 3, 2009 .
• ↑ "McCain Campaign Pushed Now-Discredited Attack Story" . TPM. October 24, 2008. Archived from the original on October 25, 2008.
• Stelter, Brian (April 27, 2011). " 'Birthers' Fanned Flames of Conspiracy for Years" . The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved October 20, 2017 .
• "Obama birth certificate release won't kill "birther" movement" . Retrieved October 20, 2017 .
• ↑ "Hillary health myth: From Twitter theories to a Trump speech - BBC News" . August 19, 2016 . Retrieved August 22, 2016 .
• ↑ Stelter, Brian (August 8, 2016). "Drudge Report misleads readers with Hillary Clinton photo" . CNNMoney . Retrieved August 8, 2016 .
• ↑ Weigel, David (August 8, 2016). "Armed with junk science and old photos, critics question #HillarysHealth" . Washington Post . Retrieved August 8, 2016 .
• Golshan, Tara (October 3, 2016). "Drudge Report is spreading a conspiracy about Bill Clinton it debunked in 1999" . Vox .
• Emery, David (October 3, 2016). "Paternity Jest" . Snopes.com .
• ↑ Silva, Cristina (December 29, 2016). "US Government Attacks Drudge Report? Conservative Website Down Because Of Distributed Denial Of Service Attack, Matt Drudge Tweets" . International Business Times . Retrieved December 30, 2016 .
• ↑ Hadley, Greg (December 29, 2016). "Matt Drudge suggests US government behind cyberattack on 'Drudge Report' " . The Sacramento Bee . Retrieved December 30, 2016 .
• ↑ Darcy, Oliver (January 8, 2017). "Someone is trying to take down the Drudge Report, and it's a mystery who's behind it" . Business Insider .
• ↑ "Flynn under fire for fake news" . POLITICO . Retrieved October 20, 2017 .
• ↑ Darcy, Oliver. "Exclusive: The chaos behind the scenes of Fox News' now-retracted Seth Rich story" . CNNMoney . Retrieved October 20, 2017 .
• ↑ Grynbaum, Michael M. (October 9, 2017). "Las Vegas Massacre Gives InfoWars More Conspiracy Fodder" . The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved October 20, 2017 .
• 1 2 Ansari, Brianna Sacks, Talal. "Breitbart Made Up False Story That Immigrant Started Deadly Sonoma Wildfires, Sheriff's Office Says" . BuzzFeed . Retrieved October 20, 2017 . {{ cite web }} : CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link )
• ↑ "FACT CHECK: Were Gun-Toting Children Photographed on the United States Border?" . Snopes.com . Retrieved June 19, 2018 .
• ↑ Frej, Willa (June 19, 2018). "Drudge Report Used Photo Of Children In Syria To Depict U.S. Border Crisis" . Huffington Post . Retrieved June 19, 2018 .
• ↑ "The Drudge Report chose a very misleading photo for a child immigration story" . Vox . Retrieved June 19, 2018 .
• "Drudge Report Archive" . December 1998. Archived from the original on October 17, 2014 . Retrieved October 10, 2014 .
• "Internet Archive (less comprehensive)" . December 10, 1997. Archived from the original on November 1, 2001.
• "Drudge Report Archives" . November 2001.

Matt Drudge Has Barely Changed Anything About The Drudge Report In The Last 20 Years. This Summer, He Upended Its Advertising Business.

A change to the secretive publisher’s business has revealed new details about his operation and is attracting scrutiny from the ad industry.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

The Drudge Report, with its Web 1.0 design offering a single page of links, is one of the enduring internet media business success stories. Two decades after rising to prominence for breaking news of the Bill Clinton– Monica Lewinsky affair, it remains one of the most popular websites in the United States and a key source of right-wing ideas for its readers, including President Donald Trump .

Owner Matt Drudge is also still adept at attracting attention, such as last week when his was the only major news site to post the El Paso, Texas, Walmart shooter’s manifesto. But the site has always resisted the temptation to build anything beyond the simplest business of selling display advertising on a single homepage.

Now, Drudge has quietly flipped the switch on perhaps the biggest change he’s ever made: He’s ditched his longtime advertising partner for a new representative, in the process revealing new details about his business and attracting scrutiny of how his site operates.

The reclusive publisher does not disclose revenue figures, but estimates put the site’s annual haul well into the realm of millions of dollars per year. Pathmatics, a marketing intelligence platform, estimates that over the past 12 months the site generated more than $30 million in ad revenue. Another estimate from the Global Disinformation Index , to be published in a report next month, pegs revenue at $9 million per year.

In a surprising turn, Drudge Report removed ads between the end of May and mid-July, according to Danny Rogers, a cofounder of the Global Disinformation Index, a project that’s analyzing domains to generate “risk ratings of the world’s media sites.” After noticing an absence of ads on Drudge around May 31, “we didn’t see any ads on Drudge until about July 12,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News.

During that period, Drudge cast off his advertising representative of close to 20 years, Intermarkets, in favor of a new and unknown company, Granite Cubed. It has no record in the digital ad industry, was only registered as a company in March of this year, and lists no staff or owners on its websites. Yet it just landed one of the biggest websites in the US.

“Any time a 20-year relationship comes to an end is certainly a surprising turn of events,” said Jay Friedman, president of Goodway Group , a digital agency that specializes in programmatic media buying.

Corporate records show that Granite Cubed is owned by Margaret Otto. She and her husband, Adrian, have a business association with the Drudge family that goes back years. The couple acquired Refdesk, a reference website founded by Bob Drudge, Matt’s father, in 2017. They also operated a company that began hosting the Drudge Report in 1999 and later added Breitbart as a customer. (The couple did not answer questions about whether they still own that hosting company or if it’s still hosting Drudge or Breitbart.)

Adrian Otto is the technical director of Google Cloud. He told BuzzFeed News he is not involved with Granite Cubed. Upon joining Google in 2017 from Rackspace, he said, he “stopped operating [his] other business interests” and is no longer involved with “hosting duties” for other websites. Otto was previously listed as the technical contact in the domain registration of breitbart.com, and was thanked by name in the foreword to Andrew Breitbart’s book about Hollywood.

“I knew Andrew Breitbart when he was alive, and helped him with some technical work,” Otto said.

Margaret Otto declined to discuss her company’s plans for Drudge Report or Refdesk, which she said is also represented by Granite. She wouldn’t say if she represents other websites or answer other questions, such as whether Matt or Bob Drudge were shareholders in Granite.

“We respect our customer’s privacy, and therefore, cannot comment on the other questions,” she said in an email.

Friedman said the connections between the Ottos and Drudges raise a question of whether the move to Granite Cubed is “a relationship play [or] a revenue maximization play,” given that today’s representation firms need to be “incredibly technically savvy and have a really good grasp on how to [succeed] in an automated ad market.”

Drudge was characteristically silent when emailed by BuzzFeed News for comment about his new advertising partner and the strategy for his site. His old partners were also hesitant to speak, reinforcing how one of the web’s most influential websites remains in many ways a one-man black box.

“Intermarkets no longer represents DrudgeReport.com, and it is our policy to not discuss former clients with the media,” said Kevin Lucido, the CEO of Intermarkets, which represents other conservative publishers, such as the Media Research Center and the Political Insider.

For his part, Bob Drudge said in an email, “I am retired and have no comment.”

It all makes for a startling shift for a publisher best known for a strategy rooted in changing nothing about his site’s operation. It’s also causing the ad industry to look closely at the mysterious new firm and its high-profile customer.

Friedman said Granite Cubed’s lack of a track record and profile in the industry will be a challenge if it tries to sell ad space directly to brands and agencies. “Certainly if you decide to go to big brands and sell directly, the Granite Cubed thing is going to be challenging. [Brands] get 100 requests a week for meetings and this probably isn’t going to float to the top,” even if they’re representing Drudge, he said.

Others in the industry say they had concerns about Drudge long before the switch to Granite. A manager at another ad tech company told BuzzFeed News he blocked the Drudge Report from its systems in 2017 due to “unacceptable auto-refreshing practices.”

After being loaded in a web browser, Drudge’s site automatically reloads itself after two minutes. The manager said the frequent refresh rate for Drudge Report raised concerns about the number of ads being loaded that were actually able to be viewed by users.

“The page was refreshing approximately every 120 seconds, with no consideration given to user activity. The user could have it open in a background tab and it would accrue [ad] impressions all day long,” said the manager, who requested anonymity because he’s not authorized to speak to the media about specific websites.

The manager said they also removed refdesk.com from the platform due to similar concerns.

Drudge, Granite, and Intermarkets declined to comment on the refresh rate or the comments from the ad tech company manager.

In an interview with Ad Age last year , Erik Requidan, an Intermarkets executive who helped oversee Drudge’s monetization efforts, spoke about how the site’s seemingly low-tech design belied a more “sophisticated” ad operation.

“What seems like a pretty simple thing on the surface is actually quite sophisticated and effective,” he said.

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What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

Credit... Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

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By Lachlan Cartwright

Lachlan Cartwright has been a journalist for 20 years. He is currently a special correspondent at The Hollywood Reporter covering media, entertainment and politics.

• Published April 3, 2024 Updated April 4, 2024

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, I was outside Manhattan criminal court. It was a sunny spring day, and the Secret Service and the Police Department had blocked off the streets with barricades. The sidewalks were clogged with news crews from around the world. Supporters of Donald Trump roamed a pen that was set up to house them. Eventually, the former president was rushed out of the courthouse after being charged by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, with 34 counts of falsifying business records. His convoy departed to cheers from fans.

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I pulled up the indictment and the statement of facts on my iPhone. At the center of the case is the accusation that Trump took part in a scheme to turn The National Enquirer and its sister publications into an arm of his 2016 presidential campaign. The documents detailed three “hush money” payments made to a series of individuals to guarantee their silence about potentially damaging stories in the months before the election. Because this was done with the goal of helping his election chances, the case implied, these payments amounted to a form of illegal, undisclosed campaign spending. And, Bragg argued, because Trump created paperwork to make the payments seem like regular legal expenses, that amounted to a criminal effort at a coverup. Trump has denied the charges against him.

The documents rattled off a number of seedy stories that would have been right at home in a venerable supermarket tabloid, had they actually been published. The subjects were anonymized but recognizable to anyone who had followed the story of Trump’s entanglement with The Enquirer. His affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, of course, was the heart of it. There was also Karen McDougal, the Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1998, whose affair with Trump was similarly made to disappear, the payments for the rights to her story made to look like fees for writing a fitness column and appearing on magazine covers. (Trump has denied involvement with both women.) There were others that were lesser known, too, like Dino Sajudin, a former Trump World Tower doorman who claimed that Trump had a love child with one of the building’s employees; the story was never published, and Sajudin was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about it.

For me, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in my own professional life, one that I have come to deeply regret. Dino the Doorman? During my time at American Media Inc. (A.M.I.), The Enquirer’s parent company, I was one of the editors pushing our reporters to confirm that story. McDougal’s fitness columns were published only after I instructed a colleague to work with the model to put them together. These were all pretty normal things to do during my time there, a life-changing detour in my career, which happened to coincide with a bizarre period at A.M.I., when it was allegedly enlisted — in some ways that I saw and in others that I didn’t — into the service of helping Trump become president. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, I’m forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how I can ever set things right.

In a sense, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman who got me the job. In February 2014, while I was working at The New York Daily News, an editor there told me that Hoffman had been found dead in his West Village apartment. He asked for my help on the story. Our crime reporters tracked down the name of the person who found the body, David Bar Katz, a close friend of Hoffman’s and a playwright, but all our attempts to reach him had not borne fruit.

Soon, The National Enquirer hit newsstands with an “exclusive” interview with Katz. He said that he and Hoffman were “homosexual lovers” and that he watched Hoffman freebase cocaine the night before his death. The story quickly unraveled: The Enquirer had been talking to a David Katz, but this one was a freelance TV producer based in New Jersey. After being bombarded with calls from reporters — and consuming several beers, he later told The New York Post — he apparently decided to have some fun. The actual David Bar Katz sued A.M.I. for $50 million.

The magazine withdrew the story and settled out of court. In the end, The Enquirer took out a full-page ad in The New York Times acknowledging the error and paid Katz enough that he was able to establish an annual prize for playwrights in Hoffman’s honor. David Pecker, the chief executive of A.M.I., removed the top editor. In his place, Pecker pulled a young editor named Dylan Howard over from another A.M.I. publication, Radar Online.

Howard and I met a few years earlier in New York. He attended the same university I did in Melbourne, though we weren’t friends in Australia. Now, two Aussie journalists in New York, we swapped gossip and hit it off. I helped land him one of his biggest scoops; in 2010, I passed Charlie Sheen’s private cell number to him, and he figured out that texting Sheen when he was partying would get his attention. The two developed a rapport, and after a series of well-publicized meltdowns, Sheen invited Howard to Los Angeles to watch him take a drug test and reveal the results live on “Good Morning America.”

In March 2014, Howard and I started talking about the possibility of my coming to The Enquirer as his No.2. During a booze-fueled night at the Electric Room, a nightclub in the Meatpacking District, he walked me through the offer. A $60,000 bump in compensation — which worked out to a 75 percent raise. And I would be running a national news operation with the resources, he promised, to break agenda-setting stories.

I had never paid that much attention to the supermarket tabloids, but I knew enough to know what The Enquirer was. It published a sensational mix of celebrity scandal, true crime and “triumph over tragedy” real-life stories. It might not have been a respected newspaper, especially because of its tendency to print cover lines that stretched the truth to the breaking point. But it’s not as if it published stories about Bat Boy either. (That’s The Weekly World News.) The Enquirer’s reporters were fearless, and they did sometimes win the respect of the mainstream press. During the wrongful-death suit brought against O.J. Simpson by the parents of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, it was The Enquirer’s reporters who found photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the same type that left prints in blood at the scene of the murders. The revelation helped a jury decide that Simpson could be held responsible for the deaths.

By the time I started, The Enquirer’s weekly newsstand-sales figures hovered around 360,000, down from a high of about four million in the 1990s. Still, even in recent years, The Enquirer had broken big stories. In fact, the tabloid most likely altered the course of the 2008 presidential election when it exposed John Edwards’s affair and love child with a campaign staff member. That investigation showed the muscle and drive of The Enquirer’s reporting. Stakeouts, door knocks, documents. Reporters flying across the country. Persisting until they got the story right. Howard told me that he wanted the magazine to land ambitious stories like that. “All things going well,” he texted me, a bit hyperbolically, “you and I will be youngest editors of a national US publication ever.”

I was agonizing over the offer when the editor in chief of The Daily News, Colin Myler, called me into his office. Myler presented me with a $10,000 raise and thanked me for my work. I thought he might have caught wind of the job offer, so I mentioned it to him. He said I would be making a big mistake if I went to work for David Pecker. Deep down, I was hoping Myler would make a counteroffer, but he didn’t. I took Howard on his word. Ultimately, my hubris sealed the deal.

I started as executive editor of The Enquirer and Radar Online in mid-May. What I soon learned is that Howard, even if he wanted to, wouldn’t be changing the operation; Pecker really ran the place. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, there were “cover meetings,” when Howard and the editors of The Enquirer’s sister titles would go before Pecker and several of his top lieutenants to show a few options and analyze sales figures. If one title had a week-to-week decline, Pecker became apoplectic. I would walk through the back of the newsroom near Pecker’s office and hear him screaming through the walls. Sometimes Pecker would suggest a preferred cover line, forcing us to twist a story to fit the language. In that paranoid environment, all anyone cared about was not incurring Pecker’s wrath and being fired. (Pecker did not respond to requests for comment.)

A frustrating first year spent in a windowless office was suddenly interrupted on the afternoon of March 29, 2015, when a source told me about a woman named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez who went to the New York Police Department after being groped by Harvey Weinstein in TriBeCa. My pulse was racing — finally a worthwhile scoop. There had been rumors about Weinstein and women for years. Affairs, the “casting couch” and worse. I called Howard and was struck by his response: He seemed less interested in the story than in the identity of my source. (In response to questions from The Times, Howard said he was simply vetting the story’s sourcing, a routine part of his job duties.)

I could not figure out his attitude. But before we got any further, The Daily News broke the story, with the help of police sources. But Gutierrez still hadn’t spoken publicly, and Howard went into overdrive trying to buy her side of the story. The Enquirer, like many tabloids, sometimes paid sources for exclusive stories; this is not an acceptable practice in most newsrooms, or in the ones I’ve worked in since. Still, it seemed odd that we were trying to buy a story that we could have had free. “Cash really no object,” Howard messaged me, “so I can sling your source 5k to get it done in addition to her 20k.” But Gutierrez didn’t want $20,000. She wanted her story heard. And it continued to roll out in other outlets, through leaks from law enforcement and “movie industry” sources — who framed the matter in the media as a blackmail attempt.

Howard was in and out of my office asking for updates. “I think the stakes just increased,” he texted me, “and your source could earn some big bucks.” I texted the source saying that Gutierrez could ask for any amount of money and that the source could take a substantial cut. “She’s less concerned w money than the right moves,” the source responded. By the middle of the week, Howard told me to offer Gutierrez $150,000, with a $25,000 finder’s fee to my go-between — an extraordinary amount of money. Most stories we bought cost us about a few thousand dollars. (Howard says he was merely conveying offers at the direction of Pecker.) “She says no,” the source texted back, “don’t ask again.”

Unknown to me at the time, Weinstein had all but secured a guarantee that we would never report on his sexual transgressions. Earlier that year, the Weinstein Company signed a deal with A.M.I. to produce something called Radar TV. The plan was to take our celebrity coverage from Radar Online and use it to make a daily, live TV show in the mold of “Access Hollywood.” The deal entailed lots of lunches between Weinstein and Howard at Tribeca Grill but never resulted in an actual TV show. Still, the partnership did make Weinstein a “FOP” — Friend of Pecker — which entitled him to protection from negative coverage. He was also able to leverage his relationship with A.M.I. to use our vast news-gathering resources to collect dirt on the actresses who he thought might talk to the press.

The New York Post, The Daily Mail and other outlets painted Gutierrez as a gold-digger who had attended the “bunga bunga” parties of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Years later, I learned that one of A.M.I.’s top lawyers had informed someone in the office of Cy Vance, the Manhattan district attorney at the time, that Gutierrez was trying to sell her story to us . Vance’s office eventually announced that it would not pursue charges against Weinstein. (In the end, Gutierrez reached a settlement with Weinstein and went on to tell her story to the press.)

A couple of months later, Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower. Editorial discussions about John Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley and Bill Cosby were now interspersed with chatter about Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The headlines that resulted were not ambiguous.

“Why I am THE ONLY Choice For President EXCLUSIVE! DONALD TRUMP WRITES FOR THE ENQUIRER.” (He didn’t. A colleague cobbled the piece together, and Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and go-between with A.M.I. — got Trump’s approval for it.)

“WHO’S CHELSEA’S REAL DAD? PREZ HOPEFUL HILLARY’S MOMENT OF TRUTH. EXCLUSIVE DNA TEST RESULTS BOMBSHELL.” (We had mounted an operation to collect Chelsea Clinton’s trash in an effort to get her DNA. But because Clinton lived in a big Manhattan apartment building, it was virtually impossible to get access to her garbage; we instead got a sample off a pen she used to sign a book. The results were inconclusive, but we published the story anyway.)

“HILLARY: 6 MONTHS TO LIVE!” Cruel Bill Forces Her To Stay On Campaign Trail.”

These covers came with doctored images of Clinton looking frail, bolstered by quotes from anyone who would say the right things and had a title that tenuously qualified him to offer an opinion. The Enquirer did employ real reporters who would comb through documents, cultivate sources and use old-school reporting techniques, but I was coming to terms with the other side of the magazine, where a headline was chosen and editors and writers spun up a tenuous story to match.

This all came on the heels of a family tragedy that made my job seem even more detestable and stupid. In the spring, my dad grew ill, and when he finally got to a doctor, irregularities were found in his blood. Stomach cancer. Stage 4. He was told he had three months to live.

I had a contentious relationship with him during my adolescence, and by 22 I had moved to London to pursue journalism. He and my mother would visit, but because I was gay and hiding this from them, it kept us distant. Soon after my younger brother came out, I asked my father how he was dealing with it. “It could be worse,” he told me. “We could have two of them.” When I finally came out several years later, my father took it in and asked me, “Are you sure you’re not bi?” It took a few years, but he came to terms with having two sons who weren’t straight. By the time of his 70th birthday, he had visited me in New York, and we ran around town like teenagers. He would tell me it was one of the best weeks of his life.

I landed back in Melbourne just in time. When I had last seen my dad a few months earlier, he was a fit 71-year-old. Now the color had drained from his skin. His voice was hoarse as we hugged. Just nine days after I landed, he was admitted to a palliative-care facility. He was unconscious, but we talked to him as if he were lucid. We all slept in his room. I lay awake and listened as his breaths got further and further apart. Just after 5 a.m. on May 1, 2015, he took his last.

I buried my father and returned to New York, dazed by grief. I cried in the shower before work. I sat blankly in editorial meetings. I don’t know how I would have responded to the events that followed had I not been so depressed. But the truth is that I was: I was drinking heavily, and life felt hopeless. I was angry. I became lazy. Even a little bit crazy.

In the fall, we got a startling tip over the transom from a former doorman at Trump World Tower, who said that Trump had an affair with a woman who worked in the building and that she had given birth to a secret “love child.” The tip line was a lot of fun but presented its fair share of headaches. Because we advertised that we paid for stories, we got all types of chancers and charlatans trying their luck. So we proceeded cautiously, not only because of that but also because we knew Trump was a FOP. Howard had to check with the boss before we could make any moves.

The word came back that we could proceed, and we quickly signed the tipster, Dino Sajudin, to a source contract that would pay $30,000 if we ran his story. We assigned a team of reporters to firm it up. Before any calls were made, we wanted to ensure that we had photos of both the woman and the “love child” in hand in case they went to ground. There was a stakeout at the home of the woman. Another reporter was sent to the address of the “love child.”

With photos of both secured, we arranged for Sajudin to sit for a polygraph. This was standard practice for stories that could draw legal action from a subject. We had two private investigators who would routinely conduct lie-detector tests on sources before we ran their stories. It was an extra layer of insurance, especially because The Enquirer was a constant target of lawsuits; a polygraph could demonstrate that we had gone above and beyond to confirm that a source was telling the truth. We would sometimes spike stories when sources failed polygraphs, but over time I came to feel that the tests were a cynical way of manufacturing a good-faith effort before publication.

Sajudin passed his polygraph, but it turned out that the information was secondhand: He had heard his colleagues talking about it and had no proof. He had serious credibility issues besides. If you ran his name through Google, you would find an anonymous website that accused Sajudin of making similar allegations about a Trump World Tower resident.

I could hear from Howard’s office that Michael Cohen was calling, and I assumed he was looking for updates. I had my doubts about the story, especially as the “love adult,” as I was now calling her (she was in her late 20s), looked just like the man named on her birth certificate, who was not Donald Trump. Then, out of nowhere, the order came to stand down.

Pecker made the call to pay Sajudin $30,000, and the story was killed without Howard explaining why. It was an enormous amount of money to pay someone, especially for a story we were not running. In December, a reporter met Sajudin at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania to present him with the check. In return, he signed a new contract that stipulated that if he told the story to any third parties, he would be on the hook for a million dollars in damages to A.M.I. It was a highly unusual clause. The signed contract was put into a safe. A colleague who was working with me described what happened as a “catch and kill.” It was the first time I had heard the phrase, but it would not be the last.

As we hurtled toward the presidential primaries, there was a laser focus on stories about Trump’s rivals. Ben Carson, we alleged, had left a sponge in a woman’s brain. Bernie Sanders we accused without any evidence of being caught in a “child sex probe.” Marco Rubio, or at least someone with a similar haircut, had been photographed at a “man fest foam party.” While I had serious misgivings about publishing stories like these — which took cues from sites like Infowars and The Gateway Pundit — it also felt totally meaningless: Would anyone take this stuff seriously? I also quieted my conscience by continuing to drink heavily, every night.

Ted Cruz was a major target. We ran thinly sourced stories that suggested that he was a raging alcoholic who had five secret mistresses and was named in a madam’s “black book.” And we ran a cover story linking his father, Rafael, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That article hinged on a grainy photo contained in the Warren Commission report purporting to show Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Castro fliers with Rafael Cruz. The money quote came from a guy who ran a photo-digitization website who told the reporter with a “high degree of confidence” that it was the same person.

Then, much to everyone’s surprise — and my horror — the Cruz story was picked up by the mainstream media. Trump went on Fox News to repeat the claims, and the Cruz campaign was forced to respond. I watched in Howard’s office dumbfounded as Cruz denied the story on CNN.

I was eventually moved into a better office, one that had windows and an old safe about the size of a minifridge. The Sajudin contract was inside it, and I used it as a footrest. My old office, meanwhile, was littered with dozens of boxes that had been brought up from A.M.I.’s offices in Boca Raton, Fla. This was all the material the newsroom had collected on the Clintons over the decades. I was directed to hire a freelance researcher to go through them and generate memos so we could gin up hit pieces. The Enquirer had a similar archive of files on Trump — perhaps the most amazing trove of Trump material of any national media organization — but it was not receiving the same careful review.

Instead, I was going through the memos from the freelancer that provided the basis for spurious stories accusing Hillary Clinton of forming a “hit squad” to kill Vince Foster. Then we moved on to hyperbolic material on Bill Clinton and women. “HILLARY’S HIDING BILL’S SEX CRIMES! 36 WOMEN BREAK THEIR SILENCE” was the cover that landed in May 2016.

Between those were a drumbeat of fictitious health crises for the former first lady and presidential candidate. With the help of so-called medical experts — typically publicity-hungry pundits who understood what we wanted to hear — and the assistance of a talented art department, we tried to kill her off in print almost weekly. She would appear with her eyes made baggy and the colors in the images desaturated. In others, she swelled to fit the cover line that she had gained 103 pounds and was “Eating herself to death!” In another we purported to have her “FULL MEDICAL FILE!” which, as the cover screamed, said she had “3 strokes,” “Alzheimer’s,” “liver damage from booze” and “violent rages.”

We had another secret weapon: Michael Sylvestre. By day, Sylvestre worked at the Walt Disney Company, but at night he operated Truth and Deception Technologies in Florida. We would send Sylvestre audio clips of politicians or celebrities speaking, and after using software that he called DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis, he sent back charts at $500 per test. “HILLARY FAILED SECRET FBI LIE DETECTOR!” was one such cover. (We had no reason to believe DecepTech had been used by the F.B.I.) We went to him so often that I could signal that we required his services again by using a cranking hand motion.

In August, Howard told me he had met with a former Playboy Playmate named Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump. The woman was being represented by a lawyer, Keith Davidson, and Howard said he found her story credible. Howard told me that Pecker bought her story for $150,000 but that it would never see the light of day. It was the second catch-and-kill on Trump’s behalf that I heard about.

I started to avoid Howard as best as I could. Our interactions became icy, and colleagues in the newsroom started to notice. I felt as if I were being suffocated. And I feared that being near all of this would mean the end of my career.

Late in the afternoon on the Friday before the 2016 election, I received a call from Lukas Alpert, a Wall Street Journal reporter. He and I used to work together at The New York Post, and we kept in touch. He was on the media desk now but explained that he had been asked by a colleague on the investigative team for help on a story. Did I know anything about a woman named Karen McDougal?

I froze. I was in the newsroom and only feet from Howard. I told Alpert I would call him back. I walked to the elevator and rode it down to the entrance of the building. I explained the huge risk I was taking by helping him and the consequences if Pecker or Howard found out. I thought if I used an old-school tabloid term it would give me some cover; only the guys who had been there forever used that term.

“This was a catch-and-kill,” I told Alpert.

“What’s a catch-and-kill?” he asked.

I went on to explain the tabloid practice of buying stories to bury them. Alpert already had the outline of the story, I learned, and I filled him in on more: how Howard had flown out to Los Angeles that summer to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000, with the direction from Pecker to kill it to protect Trump. I stressed to him the importance of the term “catch and kill” and told him that if The Journal included it, it would give me some breathing room.

I went back to my office and closed the door. My heart was racing, and I was sweating. A short time later, Howard burst in.

“The Wall Street Journal has a story coming,” I recall him saying, before naming two former employees, blaming them for the leak. He slammed the door shut. The story went live after 9 that night. “National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation.” And there it was in the third paragraph. “Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as ‘catch and kill.’” I didn’t hear from Howard that weekend. No one thought Trump was going to win at that point, and the story was swallowed up in the pre-election frenzy.

That same week, I had finally hit my breaking point with the job. A few days earlier, Howard called me into his office. He explained that we would be crashing a late exclusive. He had obtained a seven-page dossier that contained what he said were emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, one of her longtime aides. The only snag was that the emails were in Italian, and we had just hours to get them translated if we wanted any chance of meeting our print deadlines.

Howard told me that Pecker had spent thousands of dollars to buy the file from a private investigator. Pecker was always paranoid about leaks and had paid this investigator’s firm to do sweeps of A.M.I.’s office looking for listening devices. And now, the investigator had become a source. (In response to questions from The Times, the investigator said he could not remember many details of this episode.)

The dossier, Howard explained, had come to our source via the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna — Italian intelligence, where the source apparently had connections. This is why the emails, though originally written in English, were in Italian. The agency had received the emails from Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the source said, which had itself hacked Clinton’s servers and obtained the emails from a laptop Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Despite the many red flags and ethical questions that chain of custody raised, Howard believed in the dossier. And besides, Pecker had already decreed that this would be the cover story. The research team had found two New York University students to translate the documents. When they arrived, I was instructed to confiscate their cellphones.

The translators finished, and we managed to close the issue by midnight. “Hillary & Huma GOING TO JAIL!” was the cover line, with bullet points claiming, among other things, a “Secret hospitalization & truth about GAY AFFAIR!” (The translations in the article were totally garbled, and the inferences we made from them were absurd.) While it made its way to the printers, I went with Howard and some colleagues to White Horse Tavern — not the famous one, the one in the Financial District. He was buzzing with glee; I could barely look him in the eyes. I needed to get out, but I needed my visa to stay in the country and find another job. I held on to the thought that this would all soon be over. The election was just six days away. Clinton looked sure to win. Trump would fade away. I would be able to find my way out and back to actual journalism.

Instead, my duties somehow became even more depraved. When The Wall Street Journal contacted A.M.I. for comment about the $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal, the company claimed that the money was not to kill her story but rather to purchase her life rights to “any relationship she has had with a then-married man,” as well as two years of fitness columns and magazine covers. This had in fact been stipulated in the contract A.M.I. drew up with her lawyer, but now we had to actually come up with the columns. I assigned a reporter to ghostwrite them, and he got on a call with McDougal to take notes while cribbing fitness tips from the internet.

Alpert and his colleagues at The Journal were chasing fresh leads. I mentioned the doorman and the events of the previous year. Alpert asked for the names, so I opened the safe and got out the contract, which contained notes with the names of the woman and the “love adult.” I texted them to Alpert, put the documents back and went to close the safe. But the door wouldn’t shut. I tried desperately, but this rickety old safe refused to close. I was starting to panic. At any time, Howard could come in. I turned up the sound on my office TV as I sat hammering at this old metal door. Finally, the bloody thing shut.

After Trump won, I could not hide my utter contempt for Howard. My position as his deputy became untenable. By this point, the two of us were barely on speaking terms. I wasted my afternoons drinking alone in nearby bars and restaurants while I devised an exit strategy. I retained an employment attorney, knowing that both Howard and Pecker would love nothing more than to screw me on the way out. Howard was enraged by my behavior and made it known to others in the newsroom.

In July 2017, after weeks of negotiations, I was presented with a nine-page separation agreement. I would be kept on as an employee for the next nine months, collecting half my salary as a form of severance. That meant I would be able to continue living in the United States until my visa expired. But the price would be my silence: a nondisclosure agreement covering A.M.I. in general and Pecker in particular. The contract’s language was so broad that it prohibited me, in perpetuity, from even writing a work of fiction about my time at the company.

On Aug. 4, I entered the morning news meeting for the final time. Howard announced to the staff I would be “working from home” for the foreseeable future. I looked him in the eye and shook his hand. It would be the last time I saw him.

About six weeks after I left and around the time The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the Weinstein story, I was walking back to my apartment when I got a call from my attorney. A.M.I.’s lawyers had sent him a letter accusing me of breaching my nondisclosure agreement on three occasions. The letter threatened termination and damages, but it was the next sentence that got me. “In the event A.M.I. terminates Mr. Cartwright’s employment he will not be entitled to lawfully remain in the USA.” I vomited. They might not have known what I’d actually done, but it seemed they were trying to scare me into silence.

I resolved that if I was approached by a journalist whom I trusted and who I knew would protect me, I would do my best to help. Someone out there could do the work I should have been doing all along. A few weeks later, I received a direct message on Twitter from a New York Times reporter. I responded to him with my cell number and agreed to meet. I told the reporter what happened in 2015 with Gutierrez. I detailed Howard’s requests for damaging information on women connected to Weinstein, which usually followed their regular TriBeCa lunches. (Howard says he never asked Enquirer staffers to share damaging information on women connected to Weinstein.) But I stressed that the real story was The Enquirer’s work on behalf of Trump.

Eventually, I got a burner phone, as I was in almost daily contact with the reporter at The Times, my contact at The Journal and others. It was hard to keep them all straight. I emailed the New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow with the subject line “Signal.” “Are you on it?” I asked. He was in touch an hour later, and I began telling him what happened with Dino the Doorman.

It became clear to me that reporters from The Journal were in possession of information that could have come from only a small circle of people, and I feared that the source was Howard. If the reporters I had been talking to were incautious, they could have easily revealed to him that I had been a source, too. It would be the ammunition Howard needed to terminate my agreement and have me booted from the country. But on the other hand, if he was a source, how could he tell Pecker that he had learned I was, too? These paranoid thoughts kept me up at night.

I had heard A.M.I. sometimes tailed current and former employees. I became convinced that the same was happening to me. That might explain an incident that took place one evening when I went to Babeland, an adult store in SoHo, and walked out with a dildo, lubricant and condoms. As I exited the store, a car pulled up, and out jumped a man with a camera, who proceeded in the most indiscreet way to take a series of photos of me with a bright flash. Before I knew it, he had jumped back in the car, and it sped off. Were those photos going to be used to embarrass me? Was it a way to scare me?

With just weeks left on my visa, I had spent six months working free as a source, a self-imposed sentence for my many crimes against journalism. By this time I was in the late stages of interviews for a new job with The Daily Beast and an opportunity to resuscitate my byline.

Since I left A.M.I., I have lived under constant threat of litigation from my former employer. A.M.I. has threatened me with a $5 million lawsuit for breach of contract. (In 2020, A.M.I. was merged with another company and renamed A360 Media; A360 Media did not respond to requests for comment.) Howard has threatened me with another $5 million suit over articles I wrote for The Daily Beast, accusing me of defamation and breach of contract. But now the facts of what happened are a matter of public record, the basis for the first-ever criminal trial of a former president. Indeed, Pecker and Howard have already testified before Bragg’s grand jury. If they’re called again to testify at the trial, they will in all likelihood be revealing some of the same information they tried to intimidate me into withholding.

As I’ve tried to come to terms with just how corrupt an organization I worked for in those years, I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that acting as a source for other journalists helped rebalance the scales — not only for me but for the public too. After the last legal threat Howard sent me, in October 2020, a lawyer representing me wrote a strongly worded letter in response, arguing that the information I shared was “in the public interest” and “in some cases, it was of profound national importance.” The letters stopped; no suits have been filed. Three years after leaving the building for the last time, I finally felt free of the place.

Then the Bragg indictment outlined, in plain and unafraid black and white, the schemes that felt so opaque and contentious and complex when I had to navigate my way through them in real time. But it was the 13-page statement of facts that brought me to tears. On Page 3, prosecutors outlined “The Catch and Kill Scheme to Suppress Negative Information,” and it revealed to me that I had been managing a newsroom with improvised explosive devices planted everywhere. The secret deal that was made at Trump Tower, where Pecker told Cohen he would act as the campaign’s “eyes and ears.” The hush-money payoffs. The plot to publish negative stories about Trump’s rivals. A scheme to influence the 2016 election.

Everything finally fit into place. There were no more secrets, and I wasn’t alone anymore. Everyone now knew.

Lachlan Cartwright is a special correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter. He has been a journalist for 20 years, reporting from Australia, London and New York.

Photo credits for top image: Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic/Getty Images (Daniels); Andrew Burton/Getty Images (Trump); Santiago Felipe/WireImage/Getty Images (Weinstein); Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images (Clinton).

Read by David Linski

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by Steven Szczesniak

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