Media Savvy: In The Field Of Journalism, Fark.com Finds The Fertilizer

From both a media and an entrepreneurial perspective, the rapid three-stage evolution of Fark.com is as dizzying as it is impressive:

Stage 1: Young tech dude in Kentucky launches a Web site in 1999 to post odd and quirky news stories simply to entertain his old college buddies.

Stage 2: Word of mouth in the first two years builds Web traffic into more than a million hits a day on all sorts of “not news” stories, usually on frivolous or bizarre topics.

Stage 3: Site becomes something of a legitimized online critique of the vapidity of mainstream media while at the same time serving both as source material for the mainstream media it mocks and continual fodder for Fark’s continued existence.

Now comes the inevitable book, “It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap as News” (Gotham, $20, 278 pages) by Fark founder and chief aggregator Drew Curtis.

As the title implies, Curtis doesn’t hold the mainstream media in high esteem. Which, when you think about what he does for a living — yes, Fark.com more than pays his bills — is not the least surprising.

The guy spends most of his days aggregating stories about bad-behaving celebrities, shark attacks, stupid criminals, bogus studies meant to scare the populace, Virgin-Mary-on-toast sightings and the like. That’s enough to turn anyone into a press cynic.

But, as the 34-year-old Versailles, Ky., resident readily admits, he perpetuates — even aids and abets — the popularity of the material about which he rails.

The irony is not lost on him. But he maintains that, as an avid media consumer, he has just as much right to critique the press as those schooled in the vocation.

“I don’t pretend to be an expert in journalism, but I know what’s being cranked out the other end,” says Curtis in a recent phone interview while on a book tour. “And I don’t know that it’s all necessarily ‘journalism.’

“I’ve been talking to journalists about the book, and they say it’s what they’ve complained about for years. A writer from the Lexington (Ky.) Herald Leader had a blog entry where she got out her Journalism 101 textbook and put chunks of it side by side with pieces from my book. It says the same thing. I’m like, ‘Holy crap, I’ve never taken a single journalism class.’ ”

Media criticism is not brain surgery, of course. So Curtis believes that everyone who watches TV news, scans news aggregation sites and unfolds a newspaper can have an informed opinion. And he says he’s read nearly 2,000 articles a day since starting the site in 1999.

He says he didn’t start out to mock the media. But, geez, they just make it so easy.

And his opinions, though laced with playful sarcasm, are nothing less than an indictment of journalistic practices.

“I kind of backed into this job,” Curtis says. “I started noticing the Jesus-face stories appearing everywhere. And there’s always an article that pops up, over and over, about how German condom sizes are too large. I can’t for the life of me figure out why (that story) keeps coming back.

“And I can’t believe the media will go on and on about where you can get your Halloween candy X-rayed but then right after that say, ‘Oh, it’s a bunch of crap; razors in candy will never happen.’ ”

Summer is the high season for what Curtis and other Farkers (he has a posse of users who comb through submissions) call “not news.” Media outlets, he says, will latch onto a story of relative insignificance and massage it into a big deal.

You may recall that 2002 was dubbed “The Summer of the Shark” (so said a Time magazine cover). The sequel came in 2005 with another spate of shark stories. Never mind that authorities say there have been only 171 shark attacks in Florida since 1882, most of them not life-threatening.

Then there are the abductions of young, white women and girls — Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, Elizabeth Smart, Samantha Runnion, et al. — that get elevated to nightly cable news melodramas. As Curtis points out, and as studies from several organizations empirically show, children of color who are abducted get far less press.

“You see a big increase in these stories that coincides very strongly with vacations for journalists, like Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks,” Curtis says. “It’s not everybody who’s lazy. There are great journalists. But like big government, 30 percent of the people are doing 100 percent of the work and the rest are trying to rack up a high score on computer solitaire.”

So, you’d think mass media would get the message and cluck its collective tongue at the stories that wind up on Fark and try mightily not to go there.

Not so, according to Curtis.

“The No. 1 highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN,” he writes. “No. 2 was Fox News. Mass media even submit a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with tag lines so outrageous it’s hard to believe these are the same people who run mass media.”

Curtis separates the media’s “sins” into types, such as “Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article” and “Equal Time for Nutjobs.”

The first category refers to dubious “studies” by foundations pushing agendas that media outlets lap up on slow news days. The latter category accuses the media of giving a platform to those without legitimate credentials on an issue.

Oh my, the sins are many, according to Curtis. Then again, where would he — and his loyal Fark readership — be without the media’s “not news” mentality?

“Everyone claims to want real news, but no one really does,” Curtis writes. “The great unwashed masses want the titillation mass media provides.”

– By Sam McMannis

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