• A long list of media luminaries and politicians, including President Obama and former president Clinton, turned out for this afternoon for a memorial service at Avery Fisher Hall in honor of Walter Cronkite. [WP, NYT, LAT]
• Stephen Farrell, a New York Times reporter taken hostage by militants in Afghanistan, was freed early this morning following a raid by British commandos; his Afghan interpreter, however, was killed. [NYT, E&P]
• The McKinsey consultants who have been reviewing operations at Condé Nast are finishing up their work and will be submitting their findings shortly. So what changes are in store for the magazine conglomerate? No one knows for sure, but further budget cuts and a closure or two are entirely likely. [NYO]
• McGraw-Hill, the parent company of BusinessWeek, reports that 93 different buyers have expressed an interest in acquiring the struggling magazine. [BN]

Oh, look at that: A self-professed fan of blogger Matt Drudge has released iDrudge, an apparently unauthorized iPhone app for reading the Drudge Report. No need to zoom in, like in Mobile Safari. Also: No ads!

Wait, this can't be right.

George W. Bush spoke critically of Barack Obama in a Washington Times story being pushed hard by Drudge tonight, a story so big and important that the Times didn't bother to insert quotation marks before posting it to their website.

A third murder committed by a right-wing extremist? Eh, worth a link, sure. Obama administration takes a "half step" to let shareholders have a say in executive compensation? Fire up the siren.

In what might be the most painfully funny Daily Show skit ever produced, Jason Jones visited the New York Times building in Midtown and interviewed some of the paper's staff, quite uncomfortably.

The clusterfucky relationship between Politico and Drudge Report reached new heights yesterday when Politico reported on the U.S. Attorney's Office of Massachusetts telling all of its staffers to stop smoking the Drudge.

Days after Matt Drudge popped up to tell New York magazine about how he doesn't enjoy having sex with men, The New Republic looks into his descent into Howard Hughes-like isolation.

Online aggregators are financial vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the news business! You know — evil digital upstarts like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times.

It turns out the Out magazine's item on Matt Drudge, which got the internet publisher so riled up last week, was sourced to a onetime gay stripper's memoir. The ex-stripper has more stories.

Andrew Breitbart has been Matt Drudge's little helper for more than a decade. But now he's all growed up, and Drudge is back on his own—or is he?

Is Matt Drudge completely over in the wake of his ill-advised hyping of pro-McCain propaganda?If you're even bothering to ask the question, the answer is self-evidently "No," it can always be argued. It was thus inevitable that someone — Slate's Jack Shafer, it turns out — would emerge to swat down the greatly exaggerated reports (from Media Matters and so forth) of Drudge's demise as an influential blogger. He works too hard and has drawn too much traffic to go away so easily, Shafer argues:

The Wall Street Journal does not, historically, endorse presidential candidates. But the newspaper has a new owner since the last election, Rupert Murdoch, who said he was considering changing that policy. It's hard to imagine the rabid right-wingers of the Journal editorial page jumping in the tank for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. But if the WSJ were to be planning an Obama endorsement, it would seem natural for conservative blogger Matt Drudge to get ahold of the news first, as he seemed to be implying in one of tonight's headlines, pictured at left. (The graphic reads "Presidential Material/Barack Obama.")

Animal New York ran Matt Drudge's montage of horrifying Hillary Clinton pics through something called the Warhol Art Maker, and the result is the glorious piece of art above. Not bad, eh? Or at least, you know, something that won't haunt your nightmares for eternity, which is an improvement. Even Obama supporters might like to frame and hang this, assuming Clinton drops out as the punditocracy near-unanimously says she will soon do, to fondly remember the good old days. [Animal]

Internet gossip Matt Drudge parted with his precious, carefully-assembled hoard of scary Hillary Clinton photos in the clearest indication yet that It Is Definitely Over for the Democratic presidential candidate. Drudge gleefully culls these pics from magazines and newspapers every morning and keeps them in a scrapbook under his bed. But he knows they'll be worthless soon so he's rushed them onto the internet, probably while crying bitter tears of loss. A bunch of talking heads said last night that Clinton was done for, and even more say so in the Drudge-linked clip after the jump.

Is the Drudge Report shrinking? One blog thinks so, and cites Alexa data — by far the most inaccurate of the website-measurement sites — to prove it. Is Drudge shrinking? No, but it also isn't growing as fast as some other sites, including the 3-year old Huffington Post. HuffPo has certainly grown its readership, recently passing 3 million unique visitors per month. But where it really matters — total visits and daily uniques, the number of people who come back every day — Drudge continues to dominate. All the more impressive, since Drudge maintains a tiny two-person staff, while HuffPo's fills a SoHo office. The sites compared by (more accurate) numbers:

When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won.

OMG! The Clintons are making lots of money! Or... something? We don't know what it means but it's SHOCKING. [Drudge]

Just before falsely accusing people of conspiring to murder a rapper, the Los Angeles Times burned a close colleague of internet publisher Matt Drudge in another, less egregious instance of slipshod journalism. In February, the paper ran a story about private-school-to-the-stars Crossroads, and allowed the schoolmaster to say a book co-authored by Andrew Breitbart, Drudge's West Coast partner-in-blogging, was partly fabricated. The paper never bothered to get reaction from Breitbart or his co-author. Woops. Finally published earlier this month, this is not the sort of correction you want to have to run about a blogger with massive amounts of traffic at his command and who you're probably seeking links from on a regular basis:

There are many, many ways to count Web audiences. Pageviews and time spent are the two most commonly watched metrics, and they’re reasonably easy to understand. Now Nielsen says it wants to use “sessions per person per month” to tally up visitors to popular news sites. Matt Drudge got ahold of the latest rankings and linked them prominently on his Drudge Report — no surprise, since he dominates the rankings. Nielsen puts Drudge Report at 19.9 sessions per person in February — roughly once per weekday. Liberal community news site DailyKos comes up second with 8.9 sessions per person. Get the rest of the list after the jump.