Former editor of the Drudge Report Joseph Curl launched yesterday a competitor to the news aggregator which has lost favor among conservatives.
Curl dubbed his site a conservative-oriented aggregator in a press release on Tuesday.
"Now more than ever, keeping up with the most important stories is a battle. With social media deluging everyone with endless posts on their news feeds, the internet needs an editor to cull the very best stories and present them on a single site. That will be the sole mission of Off The Press," he said.
Curl's new website will “include coverage from all political angles” and “a tip box for readers to contribute ideas for stories they think deserve coverage.”
Matt Drudge started his eponymous report in 1995 from this Los Angeles apartment. It was originally a gossip column covering Hollywood and Washington D.C. One of the website's hallmark moments was when it broke the news that Newsweek had killed a story on President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. In a post in January of 1998, The Drudge Report posted: “The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month. The young intern wrote long love letters to President Clinton, which she delivered through a delivery service. She was a frequent visitor at the White House after midnight, where she checked in the WAVE logs as visiting a secretary named Betty Curry, 57. The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist.”
But the once-popular site has lost its draw for many readers. It has also been widely speculated that Drudge sold the site, although he has not confirmed this rumor.
In 2020, Comscore, a media analytics company, noted “the Drudge Report posted a 45% decline in web traffic in September as the site alienated its core readers by turning against President Trump ahead of the 2020 presidential election.”
In October, 2020, Matt Lysiak, author of The Drudge Revolution, suggested to The New York Post that some of the Drudge Report’s suffering can be traced to competition from social media services like Twitter.
Armin Rosen of The New York Post noted last November that “the upper half of The Drudge Report” was at one time “the most coveted and agenda-setting real estate in right-of-center media."
“The Drudge Report once cycled through 40-50 links in a single five-hour period. The page is now updated only once or twice a day and almost never reacts to breaking news, as if it’s being run by someone who simply doesn’t care anymore,” Rosen wrote.
In addition to Curl, Paul Bedard will join the site as an editor. Bedard is a journalist and "Washington Secrets" columnist for the Washington Examiner.
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