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In an era of round-the-clock news on the Internet, most major mass media websites need to fill space when there's no real news to report on. As Drew Curtis notes, they turn to non-news stories with headlines like, "Italian salami can rev up sex life." Curtis's popular news-aggregator website Fark.com receives thousands of links daily to these types of non-stories (e.g., "Heavy travel predicted Memorial Day weekend"; "£342m of mobile phones flushed away"; "Komodo dragon mauls boy to death"). Curtis posts them under his own quirky labeling system: obvious, weird, interesting, asinine, Florida. In his new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How the Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News, Curtis notes that since early in the site's history, morning radio DJs have used Fark.com as their news resource. Recently, Curtis discovered through web traffic tracking that CNN and Fox News were hitting Fark's servers more than any other corporate outlets. The website created to make fun of what gets plugged as news has turned into a story-source for media giants and morning zoo shock jocks alike.

Curtis uses examples of non-news articles posted on Fark to drive home just how easy it is for mass media to create buzz out of nothing in these information-overload times. There's "fearmongering" (Midwest fault lines, bird flu), out-of-context celebrity comments ("Sopranos stars analyze Justice Scalia's rude gesture") and items that create "media fatigue" by being covered ad nauseam before spawning additional "has-the-media-gone-too-far" coverage (such as Dick Cheney's hunting trip shooting and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction). While Curtis's irreverent analysis can be monotonous, the actual reader comments left on Fark.com following each segment uniquely offer insight from the audience most exhausted by the barrage of "breaking news."

In his next book, Curtis would do well to tackle topics he skims in his epilogue, "What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead?" Curtis lets up on the cheekiness of the rest of his book and compellingly postulates on what local news websites should do to survive and how Internet ad revenue shortfalls can be fixed. His ideas on beating media fatigue make sense; let's hope the mass media's paying attention.