WHEN Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner revealed in a recent column that he'd soon be changing his name to Christine Daniels, the piece quickly became the No. 1 draw on the newspaper's website.
From across cyberspace the readers came. Overwhelmingly, they arrived after spotting this titillating link on a news site called the Drudge Report: "L.A. Times Shock: 'I am a Transsexual Sportswriter.' "
Hard not to click on that one.
"I knew this would play big in Los Angeles, but I was getting e-mails from Australia, Canada, Turkey, England, France, all across Europe," the veteran sportswriter says.
By day's end, the link to the column accounted for nearly 25% of visits to latimes.com -- testimony not only to the power of Penner's confessional but also to the unrivaled influence of Internet pioneer Matt Drudge.
Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they'll have something that catches Drudge's fancy -- or, as he has put it, "raises my whiskers." Most keep their fingers crossed that he'll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.
Drudge's following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news. With media organizations competing fiercely for online audiences, the whims of Matt Drudge can make a measurable difference.
Therein lies the irony.
In the late 1990s, many mainstream journalists gave Drudge a drubbing. They accused him of recklessly advancing his conservative politics with "exclusives" he'd write, often based on tips from partisan operatives.
"An idiot with a modem," huffed MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann. "The country's reigning mischief-maker," said the New York Times. "A menace to honest, responsible journalism," intoned Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff.
Sometimes Drudge was indeed wrong, like the time he falsely accused Clinton administration official Sidney Blumenthal of spousal abuse.
But usually he was right, most memorably when he disclosed in 1998 that Newsweek magazine had spiked a story on Bill Clinton's White House trysts. It was the first public revelation of the president's relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky, and it came from a 32-year-old guy operating out of a $600-a-month apartment in Hollywood.
