R.I.P. Weekly World News

[MovieWes]

Farewell Bat Boy, Elvis and Bigfoot
After 28 Years of Sensational Headlines and Out-of-This-World Stories, the Weekly World News Comes to an End

By JEFFREY KOFMAN and TED GERSTEIN
Aug. 24, 2007

Next time you're pushing a shopping cart through the checkout line at the supermarket, you might notice an old friend is missing. Remember the Weekly World News with its screaming headlines that brought a wry smile to your face?

"SANTA FOUND FROZEN IN CHUNKS OF ICE"

"100'S OF FISH WITH HUMAN LEGS WASH UP ON FRENCH RIVIERA"

"ELVIS IS ALIVE!"

For 28 years the nation turned to the pages of the Weekly World News for titillating tales of the bizarre and the wondrously wacky. Now the publication, headquartered in Florida, is closing its doors.


'A Reporter's Dream Job'
We brought together three veteran staffers who worked at WWN during the best of those years. Sal Ivone gave up writing news for the New York Daily News to write from an alternate universe at the Weekly World News.

"It was a creative cauldron," said Ivone. "Being part of a team that … basically reinvented the universe every week."

Joe Berger abandoned a career as a reporter in Washington, spending 20 doing fake news.

"It was one of the greatest work experiences of my life," he said. "It was every reporter's dream job. It was a fun job. It was a kind of job where you could go and relax, and you were working with people who were smart and bright. … There were days we would go to work and laugh and laugh and laugh."

The third member of the publication team was musician-turned-writer Bob Lind.

"I wrote, made up stories and had a wonderful time," he said with a wry smile. "There were days when I'd leave that newsroom and my face hurt and my stomach would hurt because I was around funny people."

The paper was brought to you by the same company that publishes the all-knowing National Enquirer.

It wasn't printed in color, but it never lacked it. And at its peak in the 1990s it had a large and loyal readership, selling more than 1 million copies a week.

"When we thought about our audience," said Ivone, "it was a woman. … She's doing her laundry in the laundromat. She's got a little bit of time to kill. She has 50 cents in her pocket. She just bought her kids a snack and she's bought herself a treat. And she wants a few laughs and she wants to be delighted. She wants to be transported."

"There was a whole cult in college who would buy the paper," said Lind. "One person would buy the paper. He would bring it to the dorm. Everybody would read it."

Finding an Expert
WWN may have looked like a publication assembled by crazed amateurs, but talk to these guys and it's clear that nothing in its zany pages was mere accident or buffoonery. There was method in their madness as they reported on the wanderings of Bigfoot and the latest sighting of Elvis.

"We wanted to make sure that … we didn't push it so far that the reader couldn't possibly believe it," Berger said.

But with headlines speculating on vampire sightings or the existence of two-headed zebras — who could possibly believe that?

"We had a zoologist saying that, that it was possible," said Berger with a blank face that conceals a mischievous smile. "He would explain how this was possible. We'd 'find' a scientist somewhere who would explain that it was a mutation and — and, of course, there could be a two-headed zebra."

Berger says the publication made efforts to "find" a scientist or an expert to support its stories. His playful tone makes it very clear that in the WWN newsroom there was no difference between "finding" and "fabricating." And no apologies either.

"Yeah. We would find one," said Berger. "There was somebody out there who … would tell us it was true, and so … we would back it up. And so if they wanted to believe it, that's fine."


Aliens on Capitol Hill
It wasn't a big leap from two-headed zebras to a Weekly World News mainstay — aliens.

"It's a theme that fascinates everybody. Are they here? If they are here, what are they like, what are they doing, you know? Is my neighbor a space alien? My laundry disappeared. Did a space alien eat it?"

Throughout the years, according to the Weekly World News, aliens have taken refuge in San Francisco and even formed special relationships with presidential nominees.

"They loved it. They embraced it," said Berger of the politicians, some of whom were endorsed by aliens.

But in the pages of the WWN those aliens went beyond mere endorsement. In a shocking exclusive, Weekly World News was the first to reveal that aliens were actually sitting as U.S. senators.

"That story hung in the Senate press gallery for weeks," said Berger proudly. "And the senators came by and looked at it, and none of them denied it. I mean they were — they were all surprised that it took us that long to find out."

The Rise and Fall of Bat Boy
Of all of the characters created by the Weekly World News, nothing quite matched Bat Boy, a creature who sprung from the crazed minds of the staffers and seized its front pages for years.

"He's little, but very sturdy," said Ivone. And Bat Boy's favorite meal? "Insects. Well, because he's a bat boy. … He's scary until you get to know him."

Bat Boy became such a cultural icon that he even got his own Broadway musical. And there is talk of a Bat Boy movie.

"Once we created Bat Boy, we had a saga on our hands, because it sold well and … he had to have adventures. He had to interact with the surface world."

And Bat Boy did have adventures. After being discovered in a West Virginia cave, he escaped, was hunted by the FBI, knighted by the queen — "Arise, Sir Bat Boy," the queen is reported to have uttered — and finally ended up on Broadway, where he tried and failed to fit into society.

Much like Bat Boy, in recent years the Weekly World News has been having trouble finding its place. When new owners revamped the paper, readers abandoned it. Ivone also placed some blame on the current obsession with celebrity news.

"They become much larger than life," he said. "They need to be fed and they take up almost all the resources and all the attention and all the energy away from anything else."

Berger believes television also plays a role in slipping sales.

"I think that it's a reflection of television. I think that people can get the same thing off television now. They can get the same thing off the Internet. I think it's a reflection of competition."

"If they're unhappy with Weekly World News, if they want to find out about space aliens, they can go to the Internet. They can go to TV shows. So, it's a reflection of the competition more than a reflection of the changing times. I think people are still interested in two-headed zebras and baby space."

'Goodbye to a Legend'
And so it is farewell to Bat Boy, Elvis, Bigfoot and all their friends. As a slice — OK a little quirky slice — of Americana fades into history.

So what do these three reporters believe would be a fitting Weekly World News headline for its own obituary?

Ivone: "I think it would be sent directly at our readers … and it would say 'FOR NOW, DEAR READERS, OUR STORY IS OVER.'"

Lind: "I don't know. 'ENJOYABLE NEWSPAPER CHOKES TO DEATH CASS-ELLIOT STYLE IN ITS OWN EXCESSES.'"

Berger: "I think would put something like 'WEEKLY WORLD NEWS LIVES.' 'WEEKLY WORLD NEWS IS STILL ALIVE.' Take it back to Elvis and give people the idea that we're not really dead."

"I don't know," Berger said. "It would be a very sad headline to write and I don't think there's any fitting goodbye to Weekly World News, possibly just 'goodbye to a legend' or 'the greatest newspaper ever goes out of business.'"

[MovieWes]

Aliens, Elvis, Bat Boy mourn death of Weekly World News

BY LARRY LEBOWITZ

The Weekly World News is dead, and in the words of its ripsnorting right-wing columnist Ed Anger, the tabloid's dwindling legion of fans should be ''pig-biting mad'' about it.

Based for most of its 28 years in Palm Beach County, the Weekly World News delivered the guiltiest of pleasures with wheelbarrows of wit, screaming headlines and a black-and-white design sensibility straight out of 1952.

Depending on your perspective, the WWN gloriously chronicled or shamelessly fabricated an alternate reality populated by amorous space aliens, babies born with angel wings and gardeners who marry their vegetables.

It was a cracked universe where Elvis still lives, Bigfoot could steal your wife, the face of Satan appears in clouds over New York City and the U.S. military deploys Bat Boy, with his superior cave-manuevering skills, to ``take a bite out of Bin Laden.''

It was a twisted funhouse where a blind man miraculously regains his vision -- and dumps his ugly wife, and a world-weary genius, tired of knowing and seeing it all, begs his doctors to ``CUT OUT MY BRAIN AND MAKE ME A NITWIT!''

It was a whole lot of fun.

The Weekly World News was born in 1979 when the late Generoso Pope's flagship tabloid, The National Enquirer, was forced to abandon its black-and-white format to stay ahead of rival Rupert Murdoch's hard-charging, color competitor, Star.

Pope created the WWN to squeeze a little more profit out of those black-and-white presses in Pompano Beach. It initially foundered as a third-rate gossip sheet, but hit its stride in 1981 when Eddie Clontz, a 10th-grade dropout and veteran Florida newsman, took the helm.

Clontz zagged while the other tabs zigged.

''Eddie was a genius who knew exactly what people wanted and how to get it across,'' says former Enquirer and WWN publisher Iain Calder. ``He really was the heart and soul of that operation.''

Clontz assembled a small cadre of veteran reporters and editors, many of them Southerners and British ex-pats. Calling staff meetings with a Supersoaker water gun, Clontz fostered a freewheeling, collaborative environment.

''We worked hard, but we laughed our butts off,'' said Joe Berger who spent 20 years at the WWN. ``It was a lot like recess 24 hours a day. We'd come home after an eight or nine hour day and our faces hurt.''

Freelancers clipped oddball tales from around the globe. Nothing was too wacky, goofy or incredible -- and that was before it received the WWN rewrite treatment.

Unlike staid newspapers of record that deal with concepts like ''facts'' and ''truth,'' anyone could send a story over the transom.

Clontz, who died in 2004, legendarily instructed his reporters to stay out of the way, let the sources tell the story: ''You've got to know when to stop asking questions.'' If a guy called in and said Bigfoot stole his wife, then Bigfoot stole his wife. Why fact-check your way out of that one?

''We knew our core constituency wasn't just college kids who are laughing at everything, but many people took the stories straight up and enjoyed them for what they were,'' said former WWN managing editor Sal Ivone, proud author of the tortured-genius-demands-lobotomy classic. ``They didn't want to question it. So that was the way we played it.''

For a while, readers lapped it up. Circulation peaked at 1.2 million in 1988 with a front-page edition declaring ''ELVIS IS ALIVE -- and living in Kalamazoo.'' The tip was phoned in by a Michigan housewife.

A story would often start with a shred of truth and then a WWN writer would ''polish'' it, sometimes to brilliantly ridiculous extremes. That's why the WWN was the only media outlet to score exclusive Hubble telescope photos of Heaven.

''I always thought of it as the ultimate in wish-fulfillment,'' Ivone said.

The audience responded. When the WWN ''discovered'' a hive of orphaned ghosts, thousands of readers supposedly wrote in, offering to open their homes to the adorable, abandoned specters.

At times, the writing was pure poetry.

Consider this ''lede'' -- newspaper slang for the opening paragraph of a story: ``A two-headed woman is pregnant and headed for court because one head wants to keep the baby and the other wants to abort.''

Forget that the conflicted two-headed woman wasn't named, or that she hailed from a so-obscure-that-Rand McNally-never-heard-of-it part of Africa.

The WWN cornered the market on mind-boggling science stories attributed to hard-to-track-down ''researchers'' in out-of-the-way Bulgarian 'burgs.

Ivone said running characters like Bat Boy were a byproduct of reader appetites for story arcs.

Bat Boy was one of those happy accidents that could only occur at the Weekly World News. Dick Kulpa, the WWN's graphics genius, was Photoshopping a human child's image into another alien baby.

Tired of the same-old, same-old, Kulpa gave the tyke pointy ears, fangs and huge eyes. Ivone, who was standing nearby, muttered: ''Bat Boy!'' The rest is blissful tabloid history.

Clontz's talented younger brother, Derek, quickly crafted the original tale of the wide-eyed mutant, cornered in a West Virginia cave, eating his weight in insects.

Over time, the criminally inclined half-man/half-bat escaped and was recaptured umpteen times, leading feckless cops on high-speed chases across Appalachia. After 9/11, Bat Boy evolved from evil, car-stealing miscreant to patriotic enlistee, sent into the caves of Afghanistan to hunt down Osama.

That kooky strain of jingoism was a WWN trademark.

Despite this community's five-decade obsession with all things Fidel, the WWN scooped the entire Miami media on this bombshell: ``CUBA LAUNCHES SHARK ATTACK ON U.S. -- CASTRO'S EVIL PLAN TO TERRORIZE OUR BEACHES.''

Years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ''My America'' columnist Ed Anger would get ''pig-biting mad'' about ''Sicko Russkies'' who were executing thousands of puppies to line their winter hats with fur.

Ghostwritten by a string of writers including Rafe Klinger and Eddie Clontz, Ed Anger was fighting the culture wars decades before Fox News made Bill O'Reilly a household name.

Anger was the master of the vivid opening simile: 'I'm madder than Adam with a one-inch fig leaf at how these left-wing heathens, atheists and agnostics are trying to stuff this evolution baloney down our kids' throats!''

It was quintessential WWN. A certain part of the audience unblinkingly agreed with Anger's rants against flag-burners, pantywaist liberals, pinkos, women's libbers and latté-swilling purveyors of the politically correct.

''That, to me, was the secret,'' Berger said. ``No matter how crazy it was, we gave everybody an opportunity to believe the story if they wanted to. And on the other side, they were laughing like hell. We knew we were doing a good job because we got the letters to prove it. We served both sides.''

The News deserves its own corner in any late 20th Century American pop culture museum, in a special wing dedicated to Aliens, Mutants and Conspiracies.

Without the WWN, a dozen sitting U.S. senators -- including astronaut hero John Glenn -- wouldn't have admitted that they were aliens from outer space. Bat Boy would never have become a Broadway musical. Agents Scully and Mulder channeled plenty of WWN mojo on The X Files and Tommy Lee Jones' Men In Black alien hunter proclaimed it ``the best damn investigative reporting on the planet.''

But it couldn't shine forever. New owners who didn't understand its special niche sent Clontz packing in 2001. The newsmen were replaced by freelance comedy writers. Tastes changed. The Internet thrived. Circulation plummeted.

Supermarkets stopped stocking the WWN in crucial checkout line displays, replacing it with a gaggle of seemingly identical color celebrity weeklies running variations on the same Brangelina, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan items and cautionary tales of Britney Spears' mothering techniques.

The owners finally pulled the plug last month. The last issue hits newsstands this week.

In the immortal words of Ed Anger, devoted readers should be madder than ''Michael Jackson at an all-girl slumber party . . .'' or ``a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.''

R.I.P.