"Mr. Drudge 'effectively invented clickbait,' wrote the Columbia Journalism Review."

"Frank Rich, writing in The Times in 1999, said he was a 'grandstander whom many, I included, once feared as the Devil of journalism incarnate.'... [Journalist Matthew Lysiak, author of 'The Drudge Revolution'] said in an interview that rival websites are 'licking their chops — they see blood in the water.' But he noted that there may be another factor in Drudge Report’s recent loss of traffic: the rise of social media. 'Matt Drudge was always first at everything, but not anymore, not even close — Twitter’s first,' Mr. Lysiak said. 'For years now, people have been wondering who the next Drudge is, but it isn’t a person. It’s a social media revolution, and he sees that writing on the wall.' But Mr. Drudge has a deep desire, and a talent, for staying relevant, Mr. Lysiak said. Betting big on Mr. Trump did the trick in 2016. Betting against him could work this time around. Mr. Lysiak suggested that readers who expected Mr. Drudge’s site to stay true to one line of political thought were misguided. 'In reality, while Matt Drudge has his own personal political opinions, his website has absolutely no loyalty to any political party or ideology,' he said. 'Now he’s thinking long-term, really putting his political capital on a Biden candidacy. And if that happens, he will once again weaponize his site on behalf of more conservative causes.'"

From "Drudge Report, a Trump Ally in 2016, Stops Boosting Him for 2020/A rift between the president and the online news pioneer Matt Drudge is playing out in pithy headlines and needling tweets as the campaign heats up" (NYT).

But wait... didn't you hear that Matt Drudge sold The Drudge Report (and that's why it changed)? Here's "Matt Drudge rumored to be seeking investors for Drudge Report" (NY Post)(also quoting Lysiak):

My sources say no to Ezra Klein's Vox.

Columbia Journalism Review has this:

It looks like a core editorial mission of Vox.com is going to be delivering those “really good, really clear, really comprehensive online summaries” of issues in the news. And its core innovation, at least for now, is “card stacks”—essentially, standing explainers that break a topic down question by question, chunk by chunk. In an oddly analog analogy, they’re modeled after the index cards you might have used to organize your school notes—click on a yellow-shaded phrase in a card, or in a main story, and it’ll take you right to the corresponding card.

What's odd about the "analog analogy"? It's a computer convention, going back to the desktops and trashcans of the 80s. Macintosh came out on January 24, 1984, the winter before Ezra Klein was born. Index cards and highlighters are doubly dorky, both because the real-life tools are associated with college nerds of a distant era and because of the old computer cliché of making things on screen seem like something in the real world.

Why fiddle with Vox's card stacks when there's Wikipedia? It's easier than Googling for background and clicking on the Wikipedia article (which is what nearly always comes up first), but you have to want to stay intra-Vox, and how good are those cards?

Seth Mandel at Commentary tested out the card on Ukraine:

What's wrong with the argument that Bloomberg Businessweek cover isn't racist because the artist is from Peru.

Here's the cover, in yesterday's post, where some commenters were saying something like what I'm seeing at the Columbia Journalism Review:

Sounds to me like it might have been [the artist Andres] Guzman’s decision to make the family members minorities — not Businessweek’s. And I have a hard time believing that a man from Latin America deliberately intended to portray minorities, including Latinos, in a negative light.

Ridiculous. It doesn't matter what Guzman intended or how Guzman feels about things. Bloomberg Businessweek chose to run the illustration on the cover. They are responsible for that decision which had to include judgment about how it would be perceived by potential readers. The point of a magazine cover is to reach out to readers — not to passively convey an illustration that an artist was asked to provide. If what comes in from the artist is going to strike readers as weirdly racial, the editors shouldn't run it. Does the Columbia Journalism Review seriously think otherwise?

Now, it is interesting that we perceive a cartoonish image with 4 black and/or Hispanic caricatures to be saying something about minorities. Maybe we should have evolved to the point where our natural reading of such a cartoon would be generic, but Bloomberg Businessweek's choice of cover illustration took place in the real world that currently exists.