The news-aggregating Web site Fark.com has increasingly become a staple of many people’s everyday browsing, with the links featured on the site often forwarded to friends or at least mentioned in daily "What the fuck?" conversations. Founded by Drew Curtis ten years ago this month, the site has become one of the country’s top Web destinations, and reportedly receives more than 2,500 submissions a day with about 5 million unique visitors every month.

The linked stories range from absurd to completely weird to absolutely insane to straight up news that is just interesting. Each link is tagged with appropriate labels – obvious, strange, cool, strange, scary, hero and so on. Our favorite is the “Florida” tag, which seems to simply sum some of the more disparaging tags – dumbass, fail, stupid – into one category that is always appropriate for the state that seems to have more than its fair share of ridiculousness.

Curtis also wrote "It's Not News, It's Fark: How the Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News," which was published in May 2007. The book offers a scolding look at main stream media and their non-news stories that crowd the 24-hour news cycles and crams the front pages of our newspapers when real news stories aren’t happening. The book debuted to strong reviews though, not surprisingly, it received little attention from the main stream press it discusses.

Fark founder Curtis discusses the site and his thoughts on mainstream media in the interview below.

Holly Lang/Pine Magazine: What prompted your starting the site?

Drew Curtis/Fark.com: I wanted to share random weird news articles with friends. They were much rarer back then, nowadays MSM leads with them. Last night my local NBC affiliate ran their nightly five things you need to know before you go to bed segment. One of them was tiger kittens playing. The other four were equally useless, just not as cute.

PM: What was your job before the site?

DC: I owned and operated a dialup internet service provider.

PM: Who picks the stories that are listed?

DC: If I'm around, I do it. Otherwise, there are five other guys that take turns choosing. We all have the same sensibilities as far as comedy goes.

PM: Even though you often include articles from mainstream media, your site has an alternative media feel. How do you feel you fit into the information landscape?

DC: I'm not 100 percent sure. We never really set out to become a part of it so I haven't given it much thought. Wherever we are, it's organic.

PM: I love the in-house ads you'll sometimes run mocking pharmaceutical ads, as well as well as ones highlighting media-induced frenzy (such as missing white women). What prompted those?

DC: A lot of them have to do with concepts in the book I wrote a couple years ago, regarding types of news that fills space when nothing is going on. Media fear mongering is one of the types.

PM: Can you tell me a little more about your thoughts on media fear mongering? Do you feel the 24-hour news cycle contributes to this?

DC: Without a doubt. The problem with a 24-hour news cycle is you can't just stop reporting when nothing's going on. So there are all kinds of articles in the can waiting to run. Like bacteria are on everything, we're all in danger of being killed by a natural disaster, some household object isn't kid-safe, etc. None of these are breaking news or of pressing importance; they're held back for the down news-cycle.

Incidentally, it's not media fear mongering when your life is in imminent danger, such as being in Galveston with a hurricane bearing down on you, regardless of the fact that every news company in America has at least one employee standing hip deep in surf waiting for it to make landfall.

PM: What trends have you noticed in news since you began the site?

DC: This may be at least partially our fault but I'm noticing a huge uptick in the incidence of bullshit news stories designed to get clicks. MSM has realized that they're not selling their product as one cohesive unit anymore; they're selling it a la carte. And it turns out that people click on sex, UFOs, celebrity gossip and horrifying crime (especially when there's pics and video). Combine that with a downturn in ad revenues and you've got a hell of a situation for MSM: their core product (news) is a secondary traffic draw to their websites.

PM: What is one of the more ridiculous stories you've seen this year? One of the scariest?

DC: I really wish I could remember. The problem is week after week we have better candidates. After doing this for ten years, nothing surprises me. The most horrifying article I've read this year is that all senior military officers in India have cancelled all scheduled appointments in January without saying what they'll be doing instead. I think it's pretty obvious what they'll be doing instead.

PM: As a news consumer yourself (as I imagine you are), how do you feel about massive media layoffs and what many consider the decline of print journalism as a whole? Are we okay without the newspaper?

It's actually caused by a few factors that haven't been touched on as far as I've seen.

- Craigslist killed classified ad revenue. This by itself probably killed MSM.

- People under 35 would rather get their news online; five years from now, people under 40 will rather get their news online. This shift has been happening since the mid 90s but MSM didn't act fast enough.

- The internet took away local monopolies enjoyed by newspapers for decades. Most US cities don't have more than one newspaper. The newspapers got used to being the primary news source for their local readers (and profit margins in excess of 40 percent). As readers moved online, the suddenly were in competition with each other. They didn't realize this for almost a decade.

Ad revenues online are lower because it's a new thing, but also because there are better statistics available. We now know exactly what the action on an ad was, as opposed to just guessing with print media. Additionally, now that news is consumed a la carte, the subscriber-based sales pitch (100k people read our newspaper and they'll all see your ad, and every other ad in the paper) doesn't fly anymore. Massive revenue shortfall.

In short, it's a clusterfuck of epic proportions and it's not going to get any better, ever. Why MSM isn't taking more severe action faster I have no idea. The writing is on the wall. The current situation absolutely will get worse and will not be getting better. None of the factors I mentioned is changeable.

By the way, compare and contrast with the fortunes of alt-weeklies across the US. Record income, significant growth. Why is this? They're coming (from) the other direction; they're building their organizations from the ground up as growth happens. In an nutshell, thanks to productivity gains due to tech advances over the last 20-30 years it now takes less people to do the same job covering news.

PM: Were you always a big reader of the news?

DC: sort of, I always read the strange stuff. Back when I started Fark it was a lot harder to find. These days, not so much.