Weekly World News faces own apocalypse
Supermarket checkout lines are going to seem a whole lot longer.
Weekly World News is giving up the ghost.
No more space aliens in the White House. No more Bigfoot, Elvis or Bat Boy sightings. No more “world’s fattest” baby, twins, couple or pet. No more World’s Biggest Crossword.
Owner American Media Inc. has announced that the tabloid’s Aug. 27 issue will be the last. Its brief statement blamed “challenges in the retail and wholesale magazine marketplace that have impacted the newsstand.”
The company said it will continue an online version, weeklyworldnews.com, but its future is uncertain.
Things certainly will not be the same for readers who found strange creatures, incredible events and amazing prophecies of plague, depression, invasion and apocalypse in the “hot sheet” that was hailed for the “best damn investigative reporting on the planet” by the alien-hunting “Men in Black.”
Local news will suffer, too. In Cleveland alone, residents will lose WWN’s exclusive coverage of ginormous stories that other media missed, ignored or maybe covered up:
•In 1993, it featured a front-page photo, shot from a low-flying plane, of the Lake Erie Monster – a 200-ton, “dinosaur-like” leviathan – slicing a 38-foot sailboat in half.
•Five years ago, it revealed that Cleveland was being invaded by superaggressive Brazilian cockroaches “as big as kittens,” which were eating bread by the loaf and were suspected of devouring 168 local dogs and cats.
•It disclosed that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was a spirit-channeling pyramid through which a psychic was picking up new songs being co-written by George Harrison, Roy Orbison and John Lennon.
And only WWN reported that an Amish horse-and-buggy team had qualified for the Kentucky Derby.
WWN was started in 1979 to keep black-and-white presses running and pick up the slack in coverage after the National Enquirer started printing in color and shifted its focus to celebrity gossip.
“We really struggled to tell the perfect lie,” a former WWN editor said. “There were no winks in our stories.”
The paper then billed itself as “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper” and a “journal of information and opinion.” In 2004, however, it began noting that “the reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.”
Industry analysts thought it lost a connection to its audience when it stuck out the tongue it once planted firmly in its cheek and started trying to be funny, swapping sensation for silliness. It also dropped its “Page 5 Girl” feature.
With circulation falling below 100,000 last year, it’s the smallest of 16 magazines owned by American Media, which include the Enquirer, Star, Sun, Globe and National Examiner.
Headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla., the company has struggled financially in recent years, posting losses, laying off workers and announcing it would seek to sell five publications.
The company made headlines itself when it was targeted in the unsolved anthrax mailings of 2001. A photo editor died after opening an envelope containing the spores, and the company moved its offices.
With its own “Angel of Death” poised to claim WWN, fans speculate that the tab’s spirit, stories and Bat Boy might migrate to the sister Globe.
Meantime, they can wait to check the accuracy of WWN’s “Headlines From Tomorrow.” In 2010, they predict, toy stores will sell “babbles,” or “bubbles that make inarticulate sounds when they pop.” And in 2008, doctors will coat tongue depressors with Prozac to pep up patients.
But it’s just a shadow – or a ghost – of the days when Cleveland’s cockroaches could appear inside an issue with a cover story revealing that President Lincoln was actually a woman.
The headline: “Abe Was A Babe!”