Does anybody know much about this tabloid?
Can anyone give me a brief history of how long it’s been around and why it’s so popular?
I don’t know if it is necessarily popular. It claims only the (I believe) third highest CIRCULATION in the world, not the third highest READERSHIP. Essentially, since it’s sold in every ma and pa grocery from here to Timbuktu, all that means is it is everywhere.
However, their… ahem interesting take on reality is probably what draws people to buy it.
Usually, the cover is the really sensational part. When you actually read the article, they generally give some lame explanation of the sensational cover.
“Takes journals to the edge-and beyond! Each issue covers stories that other newspapers are afraid to touch.”
Curiously the current editors of WWN and the National Enquirer are buddies:
http://sundaygazettemail.com/news/Life+&+Style/2001071533/
Maybe not so curious why:
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1199fact.htm
Not a trusted source of info tough:
http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20010523gene.asp
But it looks like the Weekly World News gets away with many things because they consider themselves entertainment, and many of the fans are in the joke. The problem is that many people do think this stuff is real news:
From Entertainment Weekly:
I have no idea when it was founded.
I will say this and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong:
**The Weekly World News is the most consistent news source in America. **
Thanks you.
I thought Uncle Cecil and the Straight Dope were the most consistent news source in america.
Do I win a prize?
Hey - I’ve got a daily Weekly World News daily calendar right here on my desk at work. So far this week, I’ve read about a couple that was mangled when his sex implant exploded, a woman with the world’s smallest waist (11 inches), the world’s youngest parents (he’s 11, she’s 7, they had a baby and want another one), and a boy born with his head on backwards.
If this isn’t reality, I don’t know what is!
(When the Weekly World News comes out with a picture of Chandra Levy marrying Elvis, you’ll all be sorry you made fun!)
This week’s headline made me laugh out loud in the checkout lane.
Castro Launches Shark Attacks On US!!!
In the early 1980’s the National Enquirer began printing its paper in color. This naturally entailed having new, larger, printing presses. Printing presses are very expensive. The presses that ran the NE in black and white (well, black) were still in fairly good shape, so rather than try and sell them, (after all, any purchaser could wind up being a competiter) the publishers decided to print a new paper.
The National Enquierer was not always the celebrity rag we know today. Rather, when it started, it was similar to what you see in the Weekly World News today. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of story ideas running today weren’t mined from old Enquirers.
I remember buying my first copy in 1983. The headline grabbed me: ‘I Had A Space Aliens Baby!’
On another note: The musical “Bat Boy”, still running Off-Broadway is based on a WWN story.
If you’re anywhere near the Chicago area, tune in to 105.9 FM between 11-2 listen to Buzz and Wendy…they talk to the editor (I think that’s what he does) of WWN every week.
It’s hysterical.
Why is it so popular?
Two words:
BAT BOY
All hail, king of kings: Batboy
If I remember rightly, the Enquirer actually started out in the 1950s as a pulp crime-reporting magazine which catered to the blood-and-graphic violence crowd. They specialized in gruesome photographs, especially gangland killings.
I’ve been a regular reader of the WWN since the mid-1980s, if that helps.
I got the bright idea that it might be a good idea to ask the WWN itself about its printing history. Feel free to check their message board for my question and any answers it generates.
Really? I didn’t know National Enquirer did the WWN. A “professor” of mine once worked for the NE back in its supernatural days. Like to tell us about interviewing vampires. (I put “professor” in quotes because he came in during my senior year and didn’t so much teach me as make me a homicidal maniac. He was also the “adviser” --read “control freak”-- for the college paper when I was editor.)
It seems like everyone in our newsroom has either a WWN calendar or a Batboy t-shirt. What does that say about us???
<shameless brag>I won my first Texas Intercollegiate Press Association award for a column that I wrote about the WWN. Here’s an excerpt:
"I know the reporters who work for the Weekly World News are all qualified journalists and uphold the highest ethical standards.
"I know this because it has been explained to me that other reporters, who fail to report on vampire attacks or Satan’s new attorney and instead chose to write about war, proverty and MSU’s 75th Anniversary, have all been paid off by the government.
"This paper strives to present all sides of an issue. In the story about Stonehenge being a prehistoric gay bar, another scholar was allowed to give his opinion: “The researcher who makes these claims is a pervert and a lunatic who twists history to satisfy his mad fantasies!” he said.
"Also, the integrity of tabloids has been demonstrated in movies. When a movie endorses something, you must listen to it. Otherwise how would those cases of “the media made me do it” ever hold up in court?
“You’ve seen “Men in Black,” right? Remember when Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith the tabloids and tells him that all the articles in them were absolutely true? Would Tommy Lee Jones lie?”</shameless brag>
I doubt that this is the secret of their success, but I always buy a copy when they do some dumb astronomy thing–FACE ON MARS TRYING TO TALK! or HUBBLE TELESCOPE PHOTOGRAPHS HEAVEN!
I think they have a dedicated fact checker who carefully removes all fact from the stories.
By contrast, the Sun, that dirty rag, consistently dislappoints me by having actual, accurate astronomy stories! When I see a tabloid headline that says, “Hubble Space Telescope Predicts End of Universe,” I damn well want to read about how the world’s gonna end next Tuesday, not a careful and well-written story on the cosmological constant!
There was a recent article at Salon on tabloids, but I can’t find it, only this older article which you might also find interesting: The Tabloids That Ate Their Competition
The thing I like best about the WWN is going through it and trying to pick out which are the real stories that actually happened, and which is totally made up. Every issue will have little blurbs scattered around that tell a wierd, but not unbeleivable story, much like the Oddly Enough newswire that Reuters runs. Figuring out which of these are really true is an interesting challenge.
I’ve stopped reading regularly, though, as that funky smell that the ink or paper has gives me some serious headaches.
Heh. Interestingly, there is a new book on the market I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby by Bill Sloan. I read this several weeks ago. Quite entertaining and informative. Sloan who wrote and edited for many years at more than one tabloid, explains the advent of WWN exactly as postcards stated. There are six tabloids currently printed in the U.S., all of them published by the same company.
My favorite WWN cover was the recent one that showed Timothy McVeigh laid out at the morgue. Only he wasn’t actually dead yet – it was the week they rescheduled his execution.
Well, MY favorite WWN cover was from a long time back. “Baby gets struck by lightning, glows in the dark.” For some reason, I just find that hysterical.
My uncle once got my dad a subscription to the weekly world news as a joke gift (a long standing family tradition). It was a riot to read, actually missed it when the subscription ran out. I actually got in good with my old history teacher by giving her the old ones, she’d post the funnier articles around the classroom (my favorite was the one that explained that all the world’s worst criminals were actually space aliens sentenced to imprisonment on earth). My brothers tended to prefer the Page Five girl…
I’d link y’all to my previous comment on this fine periodical but I’d rather just repost select portions…
Some recent headlines:
•Confessions of a pizza delivery man!
•World Exclusive! JonBenet killer REVEALED!
•World’s most accurate horoscope!
•Your shoe size tells how long you’ll live!
•OUTRAGEOUS! Govt. plan to drill for oil in Arlington Cemetery!
•Mom gives birth to 16 babies - at the same time!
•Bible’s Garden of Eden is in Wisconson, says expert!
I’m pretty sure they must have a huge sweatshop style factory with people sitting at desks & fabricating these wacko stories. Then I began to wonder if any of these stories could have even a drop of truth anywhere inside, so I did a google search for “drill for oil in arlington cemetery”. Sure enough, I got many results featuring detailed information about US Army drill regulations regarding the north end of Arlington cemetery where they are doing various studies on spanish olive oil. So it looks like there may be some truth to that one :rolleyes:
To help support their stories, they often have pictures. For example, the 16 baby story has a picture of the happy (but amazingly still alive) mother holding all 16 of her newborn babies. To accomplish this, she has to stretch her arms out w-i-d-e, almost as if she were really saying “I once caught a fish THIS big!”
The bigfoot child headline has a picture of a happy mom about to kiss her simian child. The child looks as though he is about to take a big chunk out of mom’s face. It’s pretty obvious that these are two different pictures that have been cropped together (possibly with duct tape) to appear as a single image. The overall effect brings tears to the kidneys.
At their web site we discover that Amelia Earhart is still alive and living on a tiny island in the South Pacific at the ripe age of 103. They also provide the first photo of the formerly missing pilot in which we note that, in over 60 years, she still hasn’t taken her scarf or aviator’s goggles off.
Digging further into this fine publication, we have the story of the Bat Boy who was found in West Virginia (where else?) cave. Noted zoologist Ron Dillon goes on record as saying:
Hmmm, small size and razor sharp teeth? Impossible!
This child “evolved”? Okay doc! Whatever you say!
I can’t help but notice that he was thoughtfull enough to pose for several snap shots to go along with the article.
Actually, to be fair, the second picture is obviously a mirror image of the first, as if they just flipped over the negative and said to the printer “here, now print this one half-way down the page”. Maybe WWN readers have very short attention spans and, in the middle of reading it, may forget what the story is about, so they print the same picture half-way down the page.
He had large amber eyes? You bastards! What does he have now?
Wait, don’t tell me- you found him with a radar detector!
Enough of the bat boy. Let’s go get some Psychic Advise from Serena!
Cross examination of the question:
Dear Serena: I lost my ring. Instead of checking the most ovbious places like my purse & jacket pockets, I thought it would be more effective to write a letter to a 4th rate newspaper in the hopes that you might pick mine out of the hundreds you receive every day and publish the answer for everybody in the world to see, in case there are millions of people who are also looking for lost rings that their mothers gave them on October 31, 1999.
The rest of the “psychic” advice is a real hoot, but I don’t want to quote too much… copyright stuff and all that.
I think they should be required to take the word “news” out of their name. How can they legally be allowed to call themselves a newspaper?