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Visitors to DrudgeReport.com on Saturday December 4, may have been surprised to find that Matt Drudge was reporting that The New York Times was reporting the death of: Matt Drudge. Quote: "In an obit that stretches 2/3 of a printed page on Saturday: NEW YORK TIMES: MATT DRUDGE IS DEAD!!"

The "obituary" turned out to be an opinion column: "The Strange Legacy of Matt Drudge", by Frank Rich. Drudge was exaggerating (at best). Please see the last paragraph for more on this.

Mr. Rich writes: "...while addressing the cowed mainstream media at the National Press Club, [Matt Drudge] spoke of how the Internet was 'going to save the news business' because 'every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be'." The "Strange Legacy" Mr. Rich wrote about is something he thinks has left Matt Drudge behind: corporate consolidation of the news business.

About huge consolidated corporate news organizations Mr. Rich writes: "The good news... is their resources. ...they can bankroll the journalistic talent, depth and enterprise to cover non-tabloid stories from Kosovo to Pluto... The bad news is that they leave little oxygen for the maverick, independent journalist who really might use the freedom Mr. Drudge talked about to challenge the powers that be." From earlier in Mr. Rich's column: "Whatever errors [Matt Drudge] made in his Washington coverage, they were nothing compared with his wildly mistaken conviction that any citizen can be a reporter in the new democratic era of the Internet."

Mr. Drudge saw Mr. Rich's thoughts consolidating into a kind of obituary for Matt Drudge, something like: RIP the brief career of feckless, now Fox-less Matt Drudge, once pre-eminent everybody-as-a-reporter of the internet.

Is Mr. Rich right? Specifically, was Matt Drudge mistaken about his internet vision of "everybody as a reporter?"

First, let me suggest that Matt Drudge is neither an internet reporter, nor a gossip. Style aside, Matt Drudge's daily work is primarily that of a news and opinion editor.

The Drudge Report consists of two main elements 1) standard daily links to a large collection of newspapers and columnists, and 2) a set of story headlines and leaders of up to several sentences. The daily task Editor Matt Drudge sets for himself is: to write and links these story leads. They usually are links to "mainstream news sources" such as newspapers, wire services and columnists.

The entire internet can be thought of as one big newspaper. Let's call it the "Internet Instant News." Warning: it isn't always accurate. But you can sure fit a lot of news in it! It has brand names, like The New York Times. And it has Internet Instant News editors, like Matt Drudge.

What about Matt Drudge's vision of "everybody-as-a-reporter"?

The recent WTO conference is an example of why and how this will continue.

By Tuesday evening it was obvious the disrupted Seattle conference was a major news story. On Tuesday evening, I used Drudge's AP National link to see what was going on. As Mr. Rich wrote: "...people turn to the Big Boys, not amateur citizen reporters, for News." That's what I did, and for reasons Mr. Rich cites, including: reliability and in-depth coverage. However, that evening there was no story. It didn't surprise me that this was front page on the three print papers I saw Wednesday. However, here is something that did surprise me: From 7:30 PM EST Tuesday to 8:20 AM EST Wednesday the AP National wire from newsday.com (Drudge's AP National links to this) carried no mention of this story. Nothing! For most "major, breaking" stories, AP usually has an updated version about every two hours.

Much of Editor Drudge's coverage of events in Seattle consisted of links to local Seattle sites. Later in the week, Drudge started running letters from Seattle demonstrators describing (aka "reporting") what they saw going on. I read these, and regarded them as a major news source, partly due to the fact that I perceived most "mainstream news sources" were ignoring and holding back information.

Mr. Rich picked the wrong week to announce the end of everybody-as-an-internet-reporter!

Mr. Rich greatly exaggerates in his report of the death of the "everybody-as-a-reporter" internet -- for two reasons. First, there is a continued and growing, bias-and-corruption-driven need for everybody-as-a-reporter. Mr. Rich wrote about this problem at length in his column. Second, Matt Drudge has advanced in his own career to an Editorship. Was it so obvious that we didn't notice? The inherently democratic, inherently open position of Internet Editor, pre-eminently filled by Matt Drudge and ever open to others, is a key element that I think Mr. Rich failed to note. For these two reasons, the "everybody-as-a-reporter" internet will continue and will grow.

Time for the anticlimax: what about, "NEW YORK TIMES: MATT DRUDGE IS DEAD!!" If Matt Drudge is greatly exaggerating (at best)... reports of his own death... what kind of a Mark Twain human pretzel is this? If Matt Drudge was Houdini could he escape from himself? How can anyone take him seriously? Readers of the ink-and-paper word, please consider this. Words "published" on the internet are, in a way, automatically out of context when they appear in print. On the internet, what you know to be a click away is as much a part of the context of what you are reading as the sentence on the next page of a book. Words written and published on the internet exist in a hypercontext that is simply absent from words written and published for the printed page. When Matt Drudge wrote "NEW YORK TIMES: MATT DRUDGE IS DEAD!!", internet readers were a mouse click from determining, if they choose to, whether he was serious, exaggerating, joking, and so forth. If you never use the internet, I hope these thoughts are helpful to you when you hear quotes and excerpts from it.

Copyright © 1999, Robert S. Carney Jr., 4232 Colfax Ave. So., Minneapolis, MN 55409. All rights reserved.

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