Drudge on newspapers' future

The Times of London has an interesting interview with Matt Drudge, he of the Drudge Report. Interviewer Cosmo Landesman notes that a decade ago, "Drudge was a believer in the empowering potential of the internet. ... Now he sounds disillusioned and says that the “din” is growing into a cacophony: “There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention.”

As for Web logs: “I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don’t exist."

As for newspapers, don't send the funeral flowers just yet, he says:
“The internet feeds off the main press and the main press feeds off the internet. They’re working in tandem. I think what will happen is that newspapers will be printed throughout the day so you get different editions like in the old days.”

Drudge, of course, has a vested interest on the survival of mainstream media; his fabulously successful site is 99 and 44/100ths dependent on every other newsgathering organization in the world. And from someone whose site virtually shouts at you from the screen, the comment about the Internet can be taken with some leavening. Still, as one of the oldest practitioners of the Web trade, Druge's views are worth noting, whether he's just become "old media" himself and is longing for those days when there wasn't a great deal of Internet competition or whether he might have put his finger on something here.