Five Questions with FARK.com's Drew Curtis
By David Downs
Drew Curtis might be the future of journalism and he's never written a story in his life.
Instead, he started FARK.com, a weird news aggregator so dominant, his links will crash your servers. SF Weekly recently met with Curtis at an Irish pub on Columbus St. to talk some shop about his new book, and ask him five key questions about the net and the 4th estate.
We found the 34 year-old Kentucky resident, husband, and father of two to be very smart. Curtis speaks fast and accurate, and has a grasp of geopolitics limited to those in the top quintile on the subject. He's enjoys reading the history of American conflicts and business. He's also a "bi-lobal" person.
Curtis has a computer science degree and can program a database, but he can also ascertain irony, humor and a lot of other socio-contextual relationships that coders can't grasp. An Oracle World attendee would never be able to edit FARK.
As a child, Curtis read little news, but loved columnist Dave Barry, who ended up giving Curtis a killer book jacket quote for his debut book. One could reasonably say FARK is news as if aggregated by Dave Barry. Because its users provide the content, but meat-popsicle moderators do the editing, the three-man FARK.com op qualifies as "Web 3.0," says Curtis. But is it journalism?
Maybe not old school journalism, yet Curtis notes when the Virginia Tech Massacre ripped open the country, FARKers on-campus provided eye-witness accounts in real-time, and FARK moderators kept the discussion on topic.
"I said, we can have a discussion about gun control later. Right now, we are caring about what's going on there. Who's in the dorm rooms."
Sounds a lot like reporting and editing to me. Curtis' new book slams the mainstream media for feeding people garbage as news and calls for a change, so let's the start the questions with that.
What did you do before that you know so much?
"It's one of the top questions I get and the answer is 'nothing'."
Instead, FARK's success has earned him access to more of the media circuit than any single journalist. He sits in Newscorp-affiliated meetings with Murdoch's digital right hand men, and fields calls from Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on the street. It's fair to say that over the last six months he's talked to more journalists about journalism than any j-school grad.
Up or down has the Internet made humanity better or worse?
"Neither."
It's a wash, Curtis says. Now we just know for a fact that people like dog fucking. For every hate group connecting online there's a nonprofit.
Can the American press survive its readers' tastes?
"Yes."
The long answer is that there's a niche for sober hard news for people who are smart and care, and it'll be part of a bigger media ecosystem that feeds off by and large a lot more purile reader interests.
What do you read for real news?
Stratfor -- a geopolitical info outlet, not a news source, hypechecking news. It makes money by being right, not by being sensational.
The Janes -- military procurement and hardcore geopolitics site for people with a passion for knowing what the fuck is going on.
Motley Fool on business news.
And for sports - Sports By Brooks and AOL Sports Blog.
Does society need real news and why?
"No, not really. Most people don't give a shit. ... News is like owning an exercise bike. Nobody rides it, but they like to know they could if they wanted to."
Like church, or prayer, people want news during crises, Curtis states. Other than that, fuck it.
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