From his ninth-floor, one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, Matt Drudge can look out a window and see the Capitol Records building, CNN's local headquarters and E! Entertainment's high-rise.
Each of these major news and entertainment enterprises has invested heavily in cutting themselves a piece of the Internet pie. But from his spartan haven, and with virtually no overhead or assistance, Drudge has single-handedly established himself as a spirited Internet voice who has risen high above the institutional drone.
His e-mail newsletter, the Drudge Report, is mandatory reading for the muckiest mucks in New York, Washington and Hollywood, dishing the juiciest gossip from the halls of studios, networks, record companies, political chambers and, yes, "traditional" media outlets.
How did a 30-year-old former gift shop employee, with no journalistic background and no money, create one of the hottest properties on the Internet?
Drudge, a D student who ranked 325th out of 350 in his suburban Maryland high school, never went to college. But, he says, "I've always been a media pig. As a kid, I read op-ed pieces."
Arriving in Los Angeles in the mid-'80s, he found himself employed in the CBS gift shop. His life changed when his father, a social worker, bought him a $1,500 Packard Bell PC in the fall of 1994.
"I'd pull all-nighters reading the [Associated Press] on Prodigy," he recalls. He also discovered usenet groups and began posting Hollywood gossip on alt.showbiz.gossip and rec.arts.tv. He would literally dig through CBS' trash bins to get his hands on ratings and other juicy tidbits ahead of (or instead of) the media pack.
In March 1995, Drudge quit his $30,000-a-year CBS job, and the first Drudge Report was e-mailed to the newsgroup following he had developed. It set the tone for future offerings, with a prophetic Hollywood item (Jerry Seinfeld demanding $1 million per episode), a tart political squib (regarding Pat Buchanan) and a flash report on a natural phenomenon (a Virginia earthquake).
For the first nine months, Drudge filed his report every Sunday night, and by the spring of '96, his e-mail list had grown to 1,000. Today, two years and 1,000 missives later, the Drudge Report is "filed when circumstances warrant," appearing in 40,000 e-mail boxes around the world--and that doesn't count the "pass-along rate" of those who forward items of interest to their friends and colleagues.
