A screenshot of the Jersey Report website. | JersReport.com New Jersey gets its own version of the Drudge Report

New Jerseyans can now get their news curated by a former contestant on "America’s Next Top Model."

JersReport.com — or Jersey Report — appeared without fanfare in the fall, and is now seeking to establish itself as a top New Jersey news aggregator, with much of it focusing on state politics.


But now, Jane Randall, a 26-year-old Princeton University graduate who in 2010 finished near the top of the field on the television show "America’s Next Top Model," is working aggressively to promote the site, traveling to government events and holding meetings with political insiders.

“We think New Jersey is the perfect place to apply the Drudge model. New Jersey is an influential state,” said Randall, who grew up near Baltimore and lives in Manhattan.

The site is the second Drudge-like venture founded by 36-year-old former hedge fund executive J.P. Miller, who served as the tri-state area's finance director for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.

Randall is running the New Jersey site, the sister site of EmpireReport.com across the Hudson that was founded months earlier. There are also Drudge-like sites not owned by Miller in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Colorado and Louisiana.

Despite the fact it’s modeled after the Drudge Report, Miller said Jersey Report has no ties to its high-traffic right-wing national counterpart, which often posts racially inflammatory headlines and links to the conspiracy theory site InfoWars.

“We certainly have been inspired by Matt Drudge,” Miler said. “We are huge fans of the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report is the number one most trafficked news site on the planet , but we do not have any business affiliation with Drudge.”

Like Miller, Randall has a background in Republican and conservative politics. She interned for Romney’s campaign under Miller in 2012, worked for the National Review Institute, which promotes conservatism on college campuses, and has professed her love of Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand on Twitter.

But Randall and Miller said the Jersey Report is not going to follow in Drudge’s footsteps when it comes to a political slant. The site aims to be strictly non-partisan.

“There’s no goal to go one way or the other. The goal is simply to make headlines more interesting and more unfortunate than they might be otherwise,” Randall said.

Randall and Miller have no plans to conduct original reporting, but think there’s a demand for it, even as New Jersey’s media shrinks as newspapers lay of employees. The state is just one of two in the nation to have a governor’s race this year (Virginia is the other), Gov. Chris Christie remains a national figure and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker is being watched as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2020.

So far, the New Jersey website has had just one advertiser. Miller didn’t share traffic numbers, but said the New York site gets hundreds of thousands of hits every week and that “the growth trajectory of the traffic of the New Jersey site for where it is kind of in the life cycle is growing at a higher rate than the New York site was.”

The Drudge bare-bones format, Randall said, helps to “keep it simple, keep it fresh, update it constantly and have interesting content..”

“It’s very basic. But it’s very successful,” she said.