Weekly World News: Batboy disappearing from newstands

[Floyd Robertson]

Say goodbye to the print version of one of the funniest "newspapers" ever.

Robert Seltzer: Forget facts; Weekly World News had a lot to say

Web Posted: 08/18/2007 06:21 PM CDT

San Antonio Express-News Rational people know that Elvis expired on Aug. 16, 1977 — a death that sent his spangled jumpsuits, if not his music, into mothballs.

Among hard-core fans, however, Elvis inspires love, devotion and a fierce resistance to anything resembling his obituary. To these people, Elvis is not dead; he is missing, and his face — greasy hair, curled lip and all — should be plastered on milk cartons throughout the country.

Enter the Weekly World News, a tabloid that sees the bizarre as normal and the normal as bizarre.

The newspaper — is that too lofty a term for this publication? — thrives on Elvis sightings, turning him into the Bigfoot of the entertainment world. Well, if Elvis is not dead, the Elvis watch may be on life support: The Weekly World News, suffering from declining circulation in recent years, will cease publication on Aug. 27.


The magazine will continue to operate its Web site, the London Observer reported, but computer screens tend to sterilize the most outlandish stories, and true devotees will miss the cheesy newsprint and the lurid black-and-white photographs that complement the words.

Ah, the words — adjectives piled upon adjectives, with a robust helping of adverbs, each one designed to push the limits of credulity. In a culture that seems to prize images above words, should we mourn the demise of a publication that was so inelegant in its use of language?

Probably not; unsophisticated speech is a barrier to understanding — we have seen this phenomenon play out with the communicator in chief — and the last thing we need is another forum for literary abuses.

And yet... and yet... sometimes the real world is too real, and if takes an Elvis sighting or a Batboy sighting or a flying cat sighting to make it more exciting, where is the harm?

Most readers realize such reports are nonsense, and people who think the items are credible probably think Mad Magazine is credible, too.

The newspaper once acknowledged its penchant for fabricating stories, not that we needed a disclaimer from the Weekly World News.

Consider some of the scoops the publication has given us since its arrival in 1979, according to various reports:

President Clinton meets with "alien" — the Spielberg variety, not the Tancredo variety.
A pit bull eats a mobile home.

Soviets clone 10,000 Hitlers.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Mark Miller, a former writer for the tabloid, explained the balancing act his editor demanded of him.

"Half the readers realize the stories are tongue-in-cheek; the other half believe they're all true," his editor told him. "You have to write the stories to satisfy both groups."

The tightrope walk would prove too treacherous for the magazine. It succumbed to the same enemy that has conquered so many other publications — declining circulation. The company, according to Miller, reported a $160 million net loss for 2006, a burden exacerbated by a debt of $1 billion.

Weekly World News writers subscribed to a simple philosophy: If facts encumber a good story, then change the facts. That tenet is good for novelists, bad for journalists. So the demise of the magazine might not be such a bad thing.

Then again, without the Weekly World News to peruse during our wait, the grocery store checkout line will become a little more boring. And if Elvis happens to show up somewhere, who will report it? The King must be spinning in his grave — or wherever he happens to be hiding out.

[Thwack]

[Tomp]

[groen]

This is really depressing. I'm going to stop at Meijer on the way home and grab a copy to frame before it goes extinct.

[SpartanGreen78]

"Mom, I can't believe you call the World Weekly News....'the news'"



"Why, there's tons of news in it."

[Tomp]

[AvgMSUJoe]

At least we still have fox news for such nonsense...

[Thwack]

[Floyd Robertson]

[Floyd Robertson]

Requiem for Bat Boy - Time Mag


Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007 By JOEL STEIN
While you aspire to your six-pack abs, your miracle diet, your glamorous life in rehab, my supermarket checkout time is spent in a world without pretense. It's a world where we good, simple men have to prepare for danger lurking from aliens, protect an Elvis who is reassuringly ALIVE! but still eating poorly, and be aware that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (also ALIVE!) are involved in a tumultuous, shaved-ape-adopting love affair in France. The Weekly World News fulfilled my reporter fantasies by ignoring the facts and my reader fantasies by doing it with very limited, large-point-size words.

The Weekly World News first appeared in 1979, when the National Enquirer went color and the only thing the publisher could think of doing with the black-and-white printing press was to run all the joke stories his editors came up with to entertain themselves. It has since become a cultural institution, spawning the award-winning Bat Boy: The Musical, driving the plot of Mike Myers' So I Married an Axe Murderer and appearing as a sly joke in Men in Black, when alien hunter Tommy Lee Jones cited it for delivering the "best damn investigative reporting on the planet." It presented a world so big anything could happen, not if we released too much carbon dioxide but if we made the more base error of cross-mating.


Now that world is about to disappear. The Aug. 27 issue will be the tabloid's last. So to eulogize the Weekly World News, I decided to take some of its writers out to dinner. This was partly because it was the right thing to do and partly because I'm hoping it starts a trend so that someone takes me out for a free meal in a few years. Freelance contributors Duncan Birmingham, a screenwriter, and Mark Miller, a former sitcom writer who provided so much copy he used 10 pseudonyms to make it look like more people worked there, did a fine job drinking to their former publication. Surprisingly, the only rule WWN writers have had to follow was that their stories had to be believable. Most of the readers, they believed, thought WWN stories were real, a perception encouraged by the editors who snuck a few real strange-but-true tales into every issue. In fact, the tabloid's slogan was NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH until 2004, when instead it began running the warning: "The reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment."


That marked the end. Like the sideshow, the monster movie, the snake-oil barker and the highway attraction, the fabulists of Huck Finn's world are gone. "The Weekly World News is kind of corny. It's so screwball and off-the-wall it feels like we're too jaded for it anymore," says Birmingham.

He's right, but I can't help thinking that's a good thing. Though I mourn its passing, I'm glad that the Weekly World News has lost so much of its readership--from 1.2 million in the 1980s to 83,000 now. In fact, I feel incredibly old to have been alive at a time when people read a newspaper with a Bigfoot beat and watched Leonard Nimoy use science to go in search of the Loch Ness monster and Atlantis. It's almost like living in a time when people try to heal themselves with ginkgo biloba.

Let Latin America have its new, goat-bloodsucking chupacabra monster. I want to live in a place where information is so pervasive that people are too smart for tall tales and Photoshop tricks, where our fake headlines are metajokes in the Onion or skewering irony on The Daily Show. It's actually a sign of progress for a society to go from inventing gods and monsters to seeking catharsis in the real life of Paris Hilton. We no longer need to conflate fiction and nonfiction to explain our world. Our fabulists aren't celebrated; Stephen Glass, JT LeRoy and James Frey are quickly caught and shamed. We decided to stop suspending our disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.


The fakery of the Weekly World News was built on the fear that comes from ignorance: in its pages other countries were woefully backward, nature was dangerous, outer space terrifying, weird-looking people scary. If we have to sacrifice Bat Boy on the altar of knowledge, then he's a small offering. Besides, he's totally freaky looking.

[SpartanGreen78]

Originally Posted by SparTodd

Buy now, sell on eBay tomorrow! CLASSIC!!!

[Floyd Robertson]

I haven't given a single thought to WWN between this thread and now. I don't even know why it popped into my head moments ago, prompting me to check to see if the website still exists.

But....

Celebrity Corner
Posted 2008-09-29 BAILOUT BOY

UPDATE: The lower house of the U.S. Congress has voted down the rescue plan to bail out Wall Street. Henry Paulson has called on Bat Boy to persuade those in the House of Representatives who rejected it to move the plan forward.
Bat Boy seemed confident that a bounty of mosquitoes and his collection of bird skulls will do the trick.
Read more...