It's Not News...

...it's an interview with Fark.com founder Drew Curtis

Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 18, 2007

In the golden summer of 1997, small-time ISP entrepreneur Drew Curtis bought fark.com when he noticed all of the good four-letter domains were being snapped up.

Until early 1999, fark.com featured a picture of a very brave squirrel and nothing else. Which, as Curtis notes, "some would argue this is better than what we have now." He briefly considered building a database of Indian curry recipes ("I like to cook, mostly because my wife can't"), but decided to go with Plan B, a site mocking the media (and occasionally Floridians) for their stupidity. Fark, he decided, should be the word for "what fills space when mass media runs out of news." Since then, Fark.com has become the go-to "news" site for the bored at work and sick at heart.

Stepping back from the day-to-day inanity/insanity of the news cycle, Curtis tries to figure out guiding principles behind why networks think it's a good idea to give airtime to 9/11 truthers ("Equal Time for Nut Jobs") or why every issue of Cosmo has exactly the same headlines ("Seasonal garbage") in his new book It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News (Gotham).

He spoke with reason on Friday about media fearmongering, dick jokes, corrupt Kentucky politicians, Matt Drudge, and why "having a few beers and doing anything on the Internet is a bad idea."

reason: How does Fark.com work?

Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com: We get about 2,000 submissions a day, with repeat URLs filtered out. I find the ones with the taglines that make me laugh and post 'em up.

Q: Do you personally approve every link that goes up on the site?

A: There are three other guys that will pick the links when I'm not around. I'm pretty extroverted, so I have to get out of the house in the evenings. I play soccer pretty much every single night and have a few beers. And I've learned the hard way that having a few beers and doing anything on the Internet is a bad idea.

Q: Your model relies on contributions of hundreds, if not thousands, of submitters of stories and headlines. Do you consider yourself part of the social networking/crowdsourcing/Web 2.0 world?

A: People are excited about this whole social networking thing but they haven't given any consideration to why they're excited about it. Because these things generate page views and therefore have value to advertisers, people mistakenly assume that there's an inherent value in the actual site. The problem with it is that if you have the masses involved in something, everything devolves into racism and dick jokes.

Q: So you don't believe in the much-vaunted wisdom of crowds? You're not Web 2.0?

A: We are and we're not. I tell people we're Web 3.0. We've accidentally stumbled on the next step in the evolution of social networking, which I call "editing." It's a novel concept.

I think that's where things are heading. It's fine to say "we want the crowd to pick the news," but when they're picking Viagra and porn, you obviously can't have that. The logical conclusion is that at some point you have to bring a little editing into the equation. That's what we've been doing all along. If most social networking sites are a social democracy, then Fark is a benevolent dictatorship.

Q: Speaking of democracy, how do you vote?

A: I tend to vote for people who are going to do stupid things and make me laugh. That's why I miss Clinton, because he was funny. He was always good for a good joke. As opposed to Bush, who is doing stupid things that are not making me laugh.

My problem with politicians in general is that I don't have a lot of respect for them. I did some lobbying back in 2000 of the government of Kentucky over some telecom issues and it was really interesting to see the power of big money when it's brought to bear and what it does to the political process.

Q: What were you lobbying for?

A: We got them to overturn [a rule change favorable to Bell South] in committee with Bell South lobbyists sitting there not realizing what we had just done. The following day this bus shows up and drops off 15 lobbyists for Bell South, including 3 former governors. We lost that one big time.

Two years later, we were going to go back to fight something else. We were going to visit a state senator who had helped us out. He kept on canceling the meeting so we finally just went over there. He pulled us into his office and closed the door and said "Guys, I can't talk to you. I got into some big trouble with this Bell South stuff. They flew me out to Atlanta to talk to the president and gave me a stern talking to. I can't have conversations with you guys. I apologize, sorry about your luck." And then he opened up the door and showed us out.

Q: Are politicians victims of corporations? Of media? Or of their own stupidity?

A: I think it's just the way it is. I used to say that if I was going to write a book it would be Things Are Bad, But They've Never Been Better. I like reading history and if you go back 100 years and look at how things ran then, it's even worse. Railroad companies had line items for bribes in Congress. Literally, they put them in their spreadsheet. The audacity that those guys had back then—we're nowhere near as bad as that today. I think it's just a part of the process, but I don't particularly like it.

Q: Why can't the media stick to serious issues?

A: What I've noticed is that the stuff that tends to stick in people's heads are not issues. I've been taking informal polls when I do book talks. I ask people "What do you think the most common thing everybody in this room knows about John Edwards is?" And the first guy always gets it: It's that he has a $200 haircut. That's the stuff that we all know. It's all the goofy things, like President [George H. W.] Bush going to the grocery store and not understanding how to use a scanner, or not understanding the cost of milk. That's what sticks in people's heads.

I have a buddy who is working for Obama's campaign, and I keep telling him stuff they ought to do for publicity. But they're really just frightened because they could do something and it might backfire terribly.

Q: What have you advised Obama's campaign to do?

A: Take advantage of current events. I was saying right after this Michael Vick thing came out: Any politician donating money to the Humane Society in the name of Michael Vick would get great media coverage. The problem is that there are so many people involved in a campaign and there's an approval process, so it takes them too long to get there.

Q: What kind of political news is the worst?

A: I have a joke in the book about White House press conferences. The press secretary, the guy that everybody is asking questions to, is the guy who didn't go to the meetings. He's not allowed in. They don't let him know anything of any use. So it's kind of odd that every day at the White House the media spend a couple of hours talking to the guy who is the least likely to know what the hell is going on. And they all know it, too. This isn't news to the people covering it. What are you guys doing? You're just goofing around.

Q: Are we doomed to the eternal media cycle of tripe?

A: I think we really are, and it's because there's a segment of media consumer out there who doesn't read media unless it's something like 9/11 or Janet Jackson's boobs.

One of the things that drives the most traffic to a news website is actual honest-to-God news. But it's on a cycle that you can't predict, and so that makes budgeting really scary because companies don't know whether or not there's another piece of real news coming around. There's nothing going on this week other than the Turkey-Armenia genocide ruling. Other than that, there's nothing of real serious import happening and who knows how long that's going to keep going? That makes it difficult for the media. In the meantime, you know Britney Spears is going to do something stupid tomorrow, and you also know that a sizeable portion of your audience only cares about that stuff anyway. So it makes it really difficult to avoid doing that stuff.