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MIAMI—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, Fla., 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-maneuvering 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, Fla. 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,” said 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 Super Soaker 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 Sept. 11, Bat Boy evolved from an evil, car-stealing miscreant to a 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 latte-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.
