30 Years Ago, Matt Drudge’s Email Newsletter Changed Media Forever

Before Twitter reshaped the news cycle into an endless scroll, there was one place where every major scoop seemed to land first: The Drudge Report.

If something big was breaking, chances are Matt Drudge had already plastered it in bold red text at the top of his homepage — long before it hit cable news or newspaper front pages. In fact, it’s hard to overstate just how seismic Drudge’s impact was when his site emerged from the margins almost 30 years ago. First as an email newsletter in 1995, and then as a web portal that became a must-read in Washington and newsrooms everywhere, The Drudge Report reshaped the entire media ecosystem.

That the site can trace its origins back 30 years also speaks to its most improbable feat of all: In a media ecosystem that’s as fragmented as ever and roiled by the impact of new technologies like AI, Drudge has managed to endure. In fact, its influence is still being felt — one obvious example being in the design of the White House’s new pro-Trump news portal, White House Wire, which mimics the look and feel of Drudge’s familiar layout. The central column of bold, black headlines, the white background, and the sparse, retro interface — it’s all a deliberate nod to a website that once dictated not only what Americans talked about, but what the press reported on.

“The Drudge Report is the Freddy Krueger of media,” journalist Matthew Lysiak, author of The Drudge Revolution, told me. “No matter how many times people think it’s dead, it remains relevant all these years later.”

Drudge rewrote the rules

Why did it take off, and what helped it endure?

Back in the 1990s, Drudge didn’t play by the traditional media rules. Its creator wasn’t bound by newsroom hierarchies or corporate oversight, and he wasn’t shy about putting his own spin on the headlines. The site famously broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, ran exclusives that cable news would scramble to verify, and over time became a dashboard for national media, shaping what led the evening news.

As Chris Moody, a journalism professor at Appalachian State University and host of the Finding Matt Drudge podcast, put it in an interview with me: “What made it work was he would tell you things you couldn’t get anywhere else. Before Twitter, it was on Drudge first.

“If The Wall Street Journal had a big scoop, all you had to do was be looking at Drudge and you could find the most important things faster than if you were hopping back and forth between The Washington Post, The New York Times, (and) The Wall Street Journal. There’s no one website that has captivated the attention of national journalists and public policy leaders like Drudge did during his most prominent era. Nothing has done that. He had everybody — the Democrats, the Republicans, and the media.”

Moody also noted that unlike so many news aggregators that more or less copy and paste headlines, Drudge’s site editorializes through layout and word choice. That editorial flair is especially apparent in the way Drudge rewrites headlines to crank up the drama, often distilling a complex news story into a provocative, spicy take.

The Drudge Report turns on Trump

One thing particularly fascinating to me, meanwhile, is the obvious anti-Trump bent that characterizes the site now, which has given space for rivals like Citizen Free Press to enter the picture. Because it wasn’t always so, particularly during the 2016 election when Drudge was overtly rooting for Trump.

But those days are gone. As I write these words, for example, the top headlines on Drudge (currently sitting in the most prominent position on the site) announce: “Alarming bruise on Trump hand,” while another purports to dig into the president’s “swollen ankles.” Look farther down the site, and there’s a headline about the administration’s response to MAGA anger over the handling of the Epstein files (“White House flails as storm rages”).

For now, much of the story of Drudge has yet to be told, including just what its reclusive namesake has been up to for the past several years – rumors abound about whether he even owns the site anymore? – as well as how the rupture with Trumpworld came about.

“Whoever’s writing on that site doesn’t like Trump, and that’s clear,” Moody told me. “But it still has relevance.”

Staggering audience numbers

The stats in the bottom right corner of the site certainly speak to Moody’s latter point.

Say what you will about diminished cultural cache, but there aren’t many news sites that can say they brought in more than 519 million visits over the past 31 days (again, according to Drudge’s own reporting of its site visits). And Drudge is pulling in those millions of clicks each month without relying on social media or SEO.

What makes the Drudge legacy even more remarkable, though, is its simplicity.

The site has barely changed its minimalistic design at all over the years. And yet it still draws a staggering amount of visitors monthly. It endures because, as Moody put it, “Drudge never had the ‘voice from nowhere’ that a lot of traditional news outlets had. He was ahead of the game in that.

“It certainly doesn’t have the cultural and political relevancy that it did in a previous time. However, it still does mega traffic for a news website. And the reason, I think, is that it’s a one-stop-shop place, but also that it’s entertaining. You can look at Drudge, and the headlines you’re reading are written in a way that has an editorial slant. It does feel that there’s a real person behind it, and it’s fun to read.”