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Hoosier Gazette spotlight: FARK’s Drew Curtis

            By Chris Kasinger, THG Features

For the uninitiated, FARK.com is a site devoted to providing links to the best odd and funny news stories from around the globe.  The five year old site has grown into one of the world’s most popular, currently averaging 8 million views a week—and is still growing.

On Saturday, March 20, FARK’s creator, Drew Curtis and friends Dusty and Josh took time out of their busy schedules to meet with The Hoosier Gazette staff for breakfast at White Light Diner in Frankfort, Kentucky.  The following story takes a look at how FARK.com influences the news you hear and read on a daily basis. 

Are you a fan of popular radio talk shows like The Bob & Tom Show or The Jim Rome Show?  Do you read your local newspaper on a daily basis or watch Headline News on CNN?  If so, you have been benefiting from the news site FARK.com without ever even knowing it.   

Chris Kasinger (left) with Drew Curtis and his son Storm at White Light Diner in Frankfort, Kentucky

FARK is the brainchild of Drew Curtis, a 31 year old database consultant from Versailles, Kentucky, a down-to-earth guy who you would be as likely to talk basketball and have a beer with as anything else.  Drew lives the life many people dream of—he has a job he enjoys that allows him plenty of time to spend with his eight month old son Storm, gets to travel the world on a regular basis, and has a website that started out as a hobby and has grown into something that has brought him international fame. 

Drew started FARK.com in February of 1999 as a way of relaying funny news stories to friends in England, where he studied for a year while in college.  Little did he know that his site would develop such a huge following (fans in cities around the world get together for ‘FARK parties’) and become the place where the major media companies would come to get much of their news, usually without citing FARK as their source.

Drew cites the news coverage of the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003 as an example.  “When the shuttle exploded, the debris in the air created a pattern on Doppler Radar that looked like rain--this showed the precise area where the explosion occurred, information I received via FARK.  I was watching the TV coverage, and the station I was watching was reporting the explosion in the wrong place.  I called a contact I have with the station and told them the mistake, and not long after the reporter changed their story.  Of course no credit was given for correcting their information.” 

The hoaxes The Hoosier Gazette has generated the past three months are more proof that the media steals from FARK on a regular basis.  Satirical stories from THG submitted to FARK about the Center for Disease Control declaring Indiana the nation’s fattest state, Purdue signing the wrong basketball player to letter-of-intent, a rock band that plays 80s covers with Christian lyrics, a man suing the WNBA for a chance to tryout, and a college student wearing a devil costume to a theatre’s showing of Passion of the Christ have been picked up by radio shows, newspapers, and even CNN’s news crawler as real.  The only place these stories could have been found is through FARK.com because this is the only place they were submitted. 

Thanks to FARK and missteps made by the mainstream media, The Hoosier Gazette has gone from a site that got 30 hits a week to one that has been viewed in 85 countries and over 400,000 times in the last three months. 

Drew has gotten a kick out of THG’s success at fooling the media.  “I like to post a well-written satirical article now and then without the ‘satire’ tag.  When the media runs with it, it shows how they take stuff from FARK and don’t check where the story originally came from.  They only cite their sources when they get burned, like the San Diego Union-Tribune did with your Jason Smith/Purdue story.”  

As a matter of fact, anytime you hear a strange or funny news story, check FARK.com—more than likely they will have the scoop and you can see for yourself where your source for news gets their information.