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More on the Drudge collapse

November 11, 2008 9:48 am ET by Eric Boehlert

Slate's Jack Shafer takes up the topic and pushes back, suggesting The Drudge Report's influence is not on the wane. Slate's evidence seems awfully thin, though.

Drudge endures, while imitators and newly minted Web stars fade, for a variety of reasons. He works incredibly hard. He cares about his site. He appears to have no interest in working for somebody else, and his entrepreneurial vigor makes the site come alive.

Our original point about Drudge still stands: Instead of driving the news during the general election, he was an irrelevant bystander. If anybody thinks that's where Drudge wants to be and that he's happy just posting headlines that have no impact on American politics, than they're probably misreading him.

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    • Author by MickD (November 11, 2008 2:43 pm ET)
         
      I think they just still look at his numbers, and are afraid to comment on relevance.
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    • Author by Tyson (November 12, 2008 9:28 am ET)
         
      You are exactly correct. There's a reason so many in the media have been commenting on Drudge these past few months (and not following his increasingly hysterical attempts to drive the news cycle)but Shafer, like Drudge in his alternate universe at times, just flat-out pretended this wasn't the real news story everyone but him is talking about. Lose the ability to drive the news cycles and Drudge is just another blogger/news aggregator, regardless of how many millions of hits he gets. And no, he clearly does not like losing that power and unmistakably tried very very hard to exercise it in the last days of the election cycle.   
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