Blog P.I.

This morning I spoke to a group of journalism interns at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism, along with David All. Now in its 19th year, the program run by Terry Michael is a special one for me: it’s what brought me to Washington in the first place. I’m not sure whether I’m a success story or a cautionary tale, as I’ve heard Terry ruefully note how many of his alumni eventually leave traditional journalism. Alas, I’m one of them.

In any case, it was a freewheeling discussion of digital politics, broadly defined. With a keyboard and projection screen at our disposal, we rambled from David’s YouTube projects for Rep. Jack Kingston to the website of my employer (and this site’s host) New Media Strategies. At one point, the question arose of Matt Drudge’s influence in the past compared to RealClearPolitics. We didn’t know the answer, so I went to Alexa (an imperfect tool, but more accurate the more traffic a site gets) to get an idea:

Wow. Now that’s a mighty steep fall for a website that once almost brought down a president, yadda yadda yadda. Now, I’m sure his influence remains greater than his traffic; after all, Washington journalists are still reading his website out of sheer inertia. As recently as September 2006, “Gang of 500″ coiner Mark Halperin said “Drudge rules our world,” which pretty much sums it up. Meanwhile, RCP has had a strong 2008, even if their traffic only spikes around the elections (David noted the first, biggest spike was election night 2004 when the site was a destination for leaked exit polls).

Back in the office this afternoon, I decided to look up another site often compared to Drudge, especially at the outset in early 2005. This one surprised me even more:

Surprising? Yes, at least if you remember how ubiquitious the Drudge Report once was. But let’s take a few things into consideration: for one, there is much, much more content on Huffington Post. The above chart is measured in page views, and every time someone clicks from the front page of HuffPo to Eat the Press or Nora Ephron’s latest Dear Jane letter to Hillary Clinton, that counts as another. Drudge meanwhile has just one page, and if my clicking habits are representative of others’, the tendency is to click on a story, hit the Back button, click again, go Back, etc. On many browsers, each subsequent view may draw upon the local cache and not register another hit for Drudge. Then again, he’s enabled that insidious technique known as auto-refresh, so if you accidentally leave his page open for any length of time, it will reload however often

var timer = setInterval(”autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3);
function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

is. Another thing to consider: Huffington’s numbers are nowhere near Drudge’s at the peak, and it’s highly unlikely she ever will — unless maybe she manages to bring down another President Clinton. (And I wouldn’t count on it.) Like M*A*S*H vs. American Idol or Star Wars Kid vs. Leave Britney Alone, there is too much competition for eyeballs, with the advent of cable television and YouTube respectively, for new programming to outperform the old.

And, clicking around a bit more, I realize I am not the first to note Arianna’s upset: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital first noted it about two weeks ago. But you know how it is. Too much demand on our attention to see everything we’d like.

P.S. Come on, Alexa. Why can’t I embed more than one of your charts on a page? The screen caps look terrible when I shrink them them to fit the column width.