When Joseph Curl decided to part ways with the Drudge Report, where he had been an editor for four years, the site’s founder, Matt Drudge, told him he should start his own news website.
So, Curl did. The result: an almost exact replica of the Drudge Report.
Curl, a veteran political reporter and a Washington Times columnist, launched “Right Read” in early January. Like the Drudge Report, Curl’s website is little more than three columns of snappy headlines that link to outside news sources, accompanied by sporadic photos and one dominant headline centered at the top of the page.
The site is hosted by the Washington Times, a decision, Curl said, inspired by the conservative paper’s editor in chief John Solomon.
“I learned an enormous amount running one of the top news aggregator sites in the world and decided that I’m pretty darn good at it,” Curl told the Washington Examiner media desk. “I told [Solomon], who’ve I’ve been friends with for years, about my plan, and he said, ‘Why don’t you start your site here at the Times.’ ”
Curl said he wakes up each day at 5 a.m. to scan between 30 and 40 newspapers from across the globe. “After years of doing this, there’s not much time spinning wheels. A story either grabs you right away or you move on,” he said. He picks stories from there and from reader-submitted emails (“readers send some of the most fascinating stories I see every day”) then begins clearing out the old links from his site to replace with the new ones.
Right Read can be accessed via the Times’ front page. Though the site has been active for nearly a month, Curl said a formal announcement from the Times will come Wednesday.
But is there a need for another conservative news aggregator? Drudge has dominated the field since the late 1990s. Others like HotAir.com and Instapundit, a blog run by PJ Media, have had their own success. Then there’s the Blaze, an aggregator with some original content, which rose from its creation in 2010 to become a web traffic behemoth. The center-right news aggregator Rare competes for the same audience. So does Fox Nation, powered by Fox News. And so does the Independent Journal Review, another right-leaning viral news site.
The Times, not too long ago, tried hosting a blog called Times 24/7, which was to be “a continuously updated blend of news, opinion and analysis from the Times combined with thoughtfully selected content from the nation’s top news sources to an audience who shares conservative values.” It didn’t last.
Then there’s Twitter, which has all but replaced individual news aggregators for news junkies and certainly national reporters looking for a constantly updated feed with the latest current events (though any political journalist will still admit to following Drudge closely).
“I like Joe Curl, but he’s not the first to try to create ‘the next Drudge Report’,” said one Washington, D.C.-based reporter who works for a conservative news outlet. “I wish righty reporters and pundits would try to build the next big thing in online media rather than creating knock-offs of previous successes — especially ones created in, and suited to, the 1990s.”
Curl rejected the claim that his new venture is a stale idea. “The Internet now is this massive flow of information, like being plugged into the Matrix,” he said. “That’s certainly Twitter. I took a break this morning and came back to find a message that said, ‘View 287 new tweets.’ I was gone 20 minutes. Someone out there who just wants to find out what’s happening doesn’t want to go to 30 different sites and read 90 different stories — or scroll through 287 tweets.”
Curl actually thinks sites with no frills — like his and the Drudge Report — will grow in demand. “I think as the Internet grows up — remember, it’s only 20 or so years old — there’ll be even more desire for a stripped-down site where readers can find a cross-section of the best stories out there,” he said. “But what one website puts at the bottom of column three might be bannered on another website. It’ll all eventually be reader preference.”
As for the site’s remarkably close resemblance to Drudge, Curl said it’s “just a format that works for news.”
It is probably too early to judge the success of Right Read. Nearly every journalist approached for this story said they either hadn’t heard of it or have only visited the site once. One reporter did say, however, that Curl links to his stories, “so I like it.”
