For a small set of journalists, being featured on Drudge is a much more ho-hum occurrence. | AP Photo On Drudge, your last name is known

The Drudge Report has been around since 1996, and it’s grown to be a powerful force in media. Since a link on the aggregated website can do wonders for a website’s traffic and exposure, many journalists are thrilled to see their stories appear on the site.

“Got a Drudge hit this morning — celebrating by going on vacation,” the Washington Examiner’s Nikki Schwab tweeted in April when she got a link. “My first editorial for @WashTimes is on Drudge. A good first day!” The Washington Times’s Emily Miller tweeted during the same month.


But for a smaller set of Washington journalists, being featured on Drudge is a much more ho-hum occurrence. Call them the “last namers.” These writers’ work appears so frequently on the site that their surnames regularly make it into Drudge’s headlines. To wit: “Schlafly: Illinois Failures Go Nationwide Under Obama” or “Halperin: Dems Start to Panic as Reality Sets In” or “Buchanan: Obama Team’s Panic Over Losing Whites.” (That’s Phyllis Schlafly, Mark Halperin and Pat Buchanan.)

For the Washington punditocracy, to attain last-name status on Drudge marks an achievement of sorts: It’s recognition that political observers find your work so familiar that a first name is hardly needed. “Having your last name touted on Drudge is sort of the Washington equivalent of first-name recognition in Hollywood, where Jen and Brad and Angelina need no further identification,” said The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz. “But I always wonder whether half of Drudge’s readers scratch their heads and say, ‘Who?’”

They may not be incredibly famous outside the Beltway, but on Drudge, they’re stars. The “last namers” of the past year include: Time’s Joe Klein; The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank; The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes; the Washington Times’s Wes Pruden; The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan; POLITICO’s Roger Simon; CNBC’s Larry Kudlow and Rick Santelli; columnists Tony Blankley and Nat Hentoff; the New York Daily News’s Stanley Crouch; University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato; the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone and Byron York; analysts Bob Shrum and Donna Brazile; Kurtz; The American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.; The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman; MSNBC’s Chris Matthews; the National Journal’s Ron Fournier and Charlie Cook; ABC’s Christiane Amanpour; Truthdig’s Robert Scheer and the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser.

Milbank said that he “was unaware that the last-name treatment was a special one, but I am all the more honored.” He explained, “This is solely because I feel validated by the Drudge imprimatur and has nothing to do with the tens of thousands of clicks his link generates.”

A personalized link on Drudge is “a leveraging device,” said Blankley. ”If it appears there, and you get five producers to book you or your client, suddenly you’re getting all of their audiences, too, compounding the initial appearance. So it’s just a tremendous force.”

Said Pruden, “I hadn’t thought about last-name only as a distinction. I’ve been writing a column twice a week for nearly 30 years, and I guess that would make anyone familiar, like a stick of furniture. A Drudge link is golden — readership spikes dramatically, which proves most of all that everybody, right or left, reads Drudge. A Drudge link expands readership far beyond the noise of the usual choir, reaching many readers of the opposite persuasion that I wouldn’t otherwise reach, who typically respond with colorful vitriol and deep purple invective.”

Not everyone, however, thinks it’s so wonderful to be featured on the right-leaning website.

“It’s both a blessing and a curse to be a headliner on Drudge,” said Brazile. “Matt is someone I know and have great respect for, but I shudder when I see my name in the headline. Why? On one hand, millions read the column, and like the author, they send you responses just as loud and shrewd as Drudge.”

Many of the writers who made the list, along with Matt Drudge, the site’s founder, and his sidekick, onetime Washington Times reporter Joe Curl — who also happens to enjoy last-name status on the site — declined to comment for this article. One Washington journalist, who insisted on anonymity, would only say, “Drudge is my god, and I don’t want to displease him, even inadvertently.”