How Fark.com Turns Weird News Into A Big Success

When heavy rains flooded Dongting Lake in the Hunan province, CNN reported the event under the headline CHINA DESPERATE FOR BREAK IN THE WEATHER. But over at Fark.com, the best skewed news site on the Net, they ran the link with a different take: SWELLING DONGTING PRESSES AGAINST GROANING DIKE.

"For me, the tag line is more important than an article," says Fark founder Drew Curtis. "If the tag line is funny, it trumps everything else."

Curtis knows. The thirty-four-year-old figured out how to become the undisputed king of weird news online. Every day from his home base in Lexington, Kentucky, Curtis aggregates twisted stories from across the Internet and serves them up -- with snarky Fark headlines -- to a rabid readership. More than 3 million people visit the site monthly. The first tie-in book -- It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News -- came out on May 31st. Self-described "Farkers" meet for beers offline whenever their fearless leader comes to town. "They keep me drunk every night," Curtis effuses.

Fark launched in 1999 after Curtis got tired of e-mailing oddball news stories to his friends. With Curtis' deft eye for comedic detail and his bionic reading-comprehension skills -- "I can process 300 articles in ten minutes with no problem," he boasts -- Fark snowballed fast. Curtis and his volunteer team of four other readers now sift through 2,000 story submissions per day, selecting the best 100 to feature on the site. Farkers take it from there, trying to out-quip each other on the accompanying forums. "We're trying to be funny," Curtis says. "It's comedy."

He's not alone. Like Fark, sites such as Boing Boing and Fazed have been working the weird-news beat for nearly a decade -- eons before the blogosphere. What's the secret to Fark's longevity? Behind the goofy headlines, these dudes know the keys of their medium: substance and brevity. "Blogs are a wire service," says Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow. "You're not writing for a magazine." Fazed founder Adam Brown says it's all about "weeding through the crap and serving up interesting nuggets without an agenda."

Some people, however, have accused Fark of harboring a conservative political agenda based on its selections. But Curtis insists he hates all politicians equally and plans to include a meter on the site that tracks the ratio of his liberal to conservative links. "I can't even remember who I voted for last time," he says. "I think I just chose the guy with the funniest-sounding name."