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LRB | John Sutherland : The Fight for Eyeballs An early attempt to describe what Matt Drudge is doing as “blogging” but without that term. Neat turn of phrase here:

The Drudge report takes the form of his latest ‘scoop’, accompanied by a gateway-link service to a hundred or so other proprietary news services and syndicated columnists. What most visitors do is click their Drudge bookmark, scan his text of the day, and then go off to their regular supplier. What the Drudge Report offers is ‘hot news, right on the edge’. With this hot news still tingling in your mind, you can look for ‘coverage’ and ‘in depth’ material from the usual places, using Drudge’s website as a stepping stone. He claims six million hits a month and as many as a million a day when a really hot and edgy story (like ‘Monica II’) is fresh. He has monitored up to three thousand hits in one day from the White House – which has a staff of a thousand.

When (as he has recently been doing rather often) Matt Drudge addresses journalists’ conventions he likes to strike a crusading pose. He foresees, as he told the National Press Conference of 2 June, ‘an era vibrating with the din of small voices . . . I envision a future where there will be 300 million reporters.’ The implication is that his ‘scoops’ are harvested from the thousand e-mails he receives every day from ‘little people’. In fact – despite the McLuhanesque rhetoric – it is clear as day that his biggest stories have arrived as lettres de cachet from insiders and lobbyists using the protective anonymity of e-mail and Drudge’s lack of scruple to get their stories out.

From 1998.