It called itself “a journal of information and opinion” and bragged about its appearance in the film Men in Black. By the end of the month, though, it will be no more.Publisher American Media will stop printing the Weekly World News at the end of the month, but will maintain the publication’s website. For almost 30 years the grocery store tabloid has been spinning yarns about UFOs, the married life of Bigfoot and demonic David Hasslehoffs. Like most of you, my Weekly World News experience was limited to check-out line browsing. I can’t remember ever reading an actual WWN story until I was required to.
A few years back, when I was working for The Messenger in Hartsville, someone faxed us a few pages from the latest issue of WWN. According to the story, a Hartsville man and his grandson pulled a mutant from Lake Robinson while fishing. The creature was a fish with the face of a man, and spoke a few words before dying.
The story was accompanied by an obviously phony photo of said mutant. Aware of my penchant for thinking outside of the box (to be polite) publisher Graham Osteen allowed me to write an “interview” with the fish.
It was meant as a joke. It wound up on the front page.
The tabloid seemed to like Hartsville. I had heard one of their writers lived in the city, but was never able to verify it. I later helped Bobby Bryant at The State research a piece about the newspaper’s infatuation with South Carolina, only to find Hartsville mentioned in another story. For whatever reason, dozens of babies born in Hartsville allegedly looked like David Hasslehoff. Sadly, he was unavailable for comment.
WWN has had a strange life, which only got stranger after it dropped pretenses of reality. Bat Boy, the half-bat, half-human child found in a cave, became a pop icon a few years back and was the subject of both a stage musical and an episode of The X-Files.
I think there’s an odd kind of synergy with having the tabloid become exclusive to the Internet. The web is home to all kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories, so the Weekly World News should feel right at home.
By Wallace McBride,
editor
