![]() ![]() Of course, every action has an equal but opposite reaction, so we now live in an era with a saturation of citizen journalism. Our modern media ecosystem is Drudge Report-style citizen journalism to the “nth” degree. ![]() Phone cameras have captured compromised politicians and helped stop bad cops. Blogs and tweets allowed citizens to highlight corruption in the federal government like IRS political profiling of conservative non-profit organizations and frustrations with school boards like in Loudoun County, Virginia. Notably, Drudge met this incredulity with the confidence and clairvoyance of someone who had seen the future and knew exactly how radically it would change political and social discourse, quoting Joseph Pulitzer and asking the assembled, “if technology has finally caught up with individual liberty, why would anyone who loves freedom want to rethink that?”Ĭertainly there were others who had begun to see fissures in the long-standing establishment media structures, but no contemporary address so succinctly outlined “a future where there'll be 300 million reporters, where anyone from anywhere can report for any reason,” nor centered around the magnitude of the coming information revolution.ĭrudge’s prominence and influence would only continue to rise in the years that followed, and the phenomenon that he identified only grew exponentially with the rise of social media and smartphones. And I guess this changes everything.” Addressing a legion of editors and newsroom traditionalists, it would be understandable that his comments would be met with skepticism by the DC crowd. Over the next 15 minutes, Drudge provided a characteristically fast-paced crash course on how media was changing, emphasizing that, “Now with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world - no middle man, no Big Brother. ![]() ![]() It's the kind of thing I'd have a headline for.” Half-jokingly, he opened with an acknowledgement of the old guard’s surprising willingness to have him speak at a luncheon: “‘Applause for Matt Drudge in Washington at the Press Club’: Now there's a scandal. The significance of the June 2, 1998, invitation of an online maverick by an august Washington institution has only been surpassed by the degree to which Drudge perfectly identified the coming revolution of the citizen journalist. ![]()
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