Origins
The Drudge Report started as a gossip column focusing on Hollywood and Washington, D.C. Matt Drudge began the email-based newsletter called Report from an apartment in Hollywood, California, using his connections with industry and media insiders to break stories, sometimes before they hit the mainstream media. Drudge in its early days maintained the website from his home in Miami Beach, Florida, with help from his assistants, who assist in story selection and headline writing. His first assistant was Andrew Breitbart. The website since April 1, 2010 is based out of the Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas. Breitbart, who described himself as "Matt Drudge’s bitch", worked the afternoon shift at the Drudge Report, as well as running his own website (breitbart.com), and another website (BigHollywood.com) providing a conservative perspective for people in the Los Angeles entertainment industry. John Ziegler (talk show host) has said that Drudge blocked Breitbart from posting content critical of Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign for the Presidency.
Drudge added former Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl to the Drudge Report staff in 2010; he followed that in 2011 with the addition of Charles Hurt, most recently the Washington bureau chief of the New York Post and a columnist for the Times, to the staff.
Drudge, who began his website in 1997 as a supplement to his $10/year email newsletter, received national attention in 1996 when he broke the news that Jack Kemp would be Republican Bob Dole's running mate in the 1996 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. After Drudge's report, Newsweek published the story.
Read more about this topic: Drudge Report
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)