Reading my back issues of TIME, I've discovered a very small albeit very sad fact. The Weekly World News is no longer in business.
Grocery store trips of my childhood were spent reading all the headlines from the tabloid rack--and the WWN was my favourite. It provided funny, just barely believable stories, with amazingly fake photographs. But my favourite part was that it was run in black-and-white, and it never changed. As I grew older I watched all the other tabloids begin to focus only on the celebrity gossip, but the consistancy of the WWN is probably what ended up killing it too.
It was a small milestone in our culture's history. It was a punchline in Men In Black, it pushed the story in So I Married an Axe Murderer, but my favourite, and it's biggest influence, is the wonderfully weird, surprisingly funny play, Bat Boy!: The Musical. (And anyone who's not seen this production should find a showing as soon as possible.)
What I did learn from that article was the interesting beginning of WWN, from the Time magazine from Aug. 27, '07, article by Joel Stein:
"The Weekly World News first appeared in
1979, when the National Enquirer went colour and the only thing the
publisher could think of doing with the black-and-white priting press was to run
all the joke stories his editors came up with to entertain
themselves."
Which is about the best way to beigin a newspaper as I've ever heard.
Alas, good-bye Weekly World News. I'll miss seeing you from the check-out line.
...I wish I had known, I would have bought my first and last copy of the WWN.
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