So I talked to Drew Curtis yesterday. Curtis is the mastermind behind Fark.com, the news aggregator site that posts -- and invites -- often humorous one-liners about stories.

Curtis has a new book out, "It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News" (Gotham Books), so with the Paris Hilton maelstrom still swirling around the news hole, it seemed like a good time to call.

Fark had a link to a Hilton Associated Press wire story yesterday on its lead "Not News" page -- the story, amusingly, came from the staid Forbes.com site -- but it wasn't the most-commented-on story. (That was the Chris Benoit tragedy.) That fits with what Curtis has come to expect from Fark -- that stories played up by the mass media (excuse me, Mass Media) aren't always the type of thing people are talking about.

But he pays tribute to Hilton for staying in the news -- which is not easy, even with 24/7 news channels and PerezHilton.com-type gossip sites. It takes work, he observes.

"It's very difficult to keep yourself newsy. You notice you don't hear anything about GoldenPalace.com anymore," he said, referring to the casino that made its name buying absurd items such as William Shatner's kidney stone.

"It's Not News, It's Fark" is a funny book, containing some of the site's greatest hits, but it's also a sharp and well-deserved criticism of the news media -- and life in a capitalistic, all-information, all-the-time world. "Because these types of stories draw eyeballs," he writes, referring to a genre of news he calls "Equal Time for Nutjobs," "bring in ad dollars, and fill space on slow news days, Mass Media can't bring itself to stop covering them."

He also offers some solutions in a strong final chapter, ideas that stand little chance of working in Web world where, as Curtis writes, "it's the fluff that brings the masses." Mass Media has to play up more serious news, he points out, but audiences also have to care.

But it's almost always been so -- take a look at 19th-century broadsheets or 1920s tabloids, for starters -- which is why he's considering a history of media for his next project. "People don't realize how far back this stuff goes," Curtis said.