I feel a little like Matt Drudge with this post.

The Drudge Report, an Internet mainstay, is a news aggregation site with a design from the Clinton era--an eternity in web-years. Despite its dated appearance, it still drives more traffic to news websites than any other source other than Google.

How does Drudge do it? Sunday's New York Times offered an explanation:

So in a news age when the next big thing changes as often as the weather, how can a guy who broke through on the Web before there was broadband still set the agenda? How can that be?

His durability is, first and foremost, a personal achievement, a testament to the fact that he is, as Gabriel Snyder, who has done Web news for Gawker, Newsweek and now The Atlantic, told me, "the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it."

The irresistible headline is the key. Drudge is not above sensationalizing mundane articles or promoting tabloid stories. But his real value comes in making blaring headlines out of obscure sentences buried in the middle of a story or highlighting an article that was entirely overlooked.

Media outlets are the gatekeepers of information. They set the agenda; they determine what is news and what isn't. Out of the thousands of stories that could potentially be made into national news, CNN, CBS, Fox, etc. choose about a dozen for the day. That gives them immense power.

Drudge's website changes that dynamic--he sets the agenda. Not only does he choose what stories to list, he picks the headline to frame the story in a different way. His success indicates that millions agree with the way he frames his stories compared to the mainstream media.

If Drudge covered Ventura County, he would have read Sunday's Ventura County Star, and written a headline like the one on this post.

That edition contained a story entitled, "Simi Town Center to Get a Major Facelift," which is about changes coming to the failing mall in Simi Valley.

The Star quotes a real estate expert from Pepperdine about macroeconomic causes for the mall's failure (it certainly isn't failing because there's no reason to go there unless you want to shop at one of the 50 women's clothing stores), including commercial real estate vacancy  trends and retail spending trends.

Then, 23 paragraphs down, is the Drudge gold.

Furthermore, he said, he believes hyper inflation will kick in about 2015, shrinking consumers' spendable dollars.

I don't know, as a reader I kind of find the fact that an expert the Star found qualified to comment on economics predicting imminent hyperinflation is more important than the troubles of the Simi Valley mall. That affects my life a little more. I've been harping on it awhile; I'm glad to see that it made its way in some form or another into a mainstream news story.

That's the beauty of the Drudge Report--in between the tabloids and the sensationalism, he is able to digest existing stories and pluck out of them truly important information.