Like a lot of people, I suppose, I developed the habit of going to the Drudge Report as a one stop shopping experience for political news. His penchant for sprinkling in some news of the weird helped keep it interesting, even when I was bored with politics. He also has an obsession with extreme weather which I find amusing for some reason. The result is that it has been my first stop for general news going back to the Clinton years. Most mornings, it is my first stop just to see if anything important blew up while I was off-line.
The thing that always worked for Drudge is that he simply linked to the news stories in the mainstream press. He was not trying to compete as a news gathering organization. He was competing more as a senior editor and headline writer. The New York Times may have decided to put something on page three below the fold, but Drudge would make it front page and give it a spicy headline. As these organizations became more dependent on web traffic, they became more Drudge friendly. That was true of writers as well.
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