Scanned pages of the Weekly World News are being hosted by Google Books. It’s the best Christmas present I could have asked for. When I was in junior high and high school, we used to buy copies of the Weekly World News all the time. It was like a MAD Magazine that pretended to be real.
I can’t deny that I’ve always had a hankering to work there. I guess The Onion is the closest thing now, but they don’t have the same panache as the WWN did.
Although they have a regularly updated website, the WWN is no longer printed as a stand-alone publication. That makes me sad. They were almost a living fossil — a link back to when tabloids were lurid and gruesome and downright weird, not just celebrity gossip all the time.
And they weren’t always made-up. I know they “enhanced” the truth to the point of breaking, but several of their stories were always based on strange-but-true happenings. And even their wild, outlandish predictions sometimes had a grain of truth to them. Consider this front-page headline: “Next Great Depression to Strike 6/6/06“. Not so far off, were they? Especially when the story cites a housing market collapse, stock market meltdown and bank failure as the causes.
Frankly, I miss ‘em. Amy bought be a book of the “best of” the WWN news which I like leafing through — but it’s even better to have full issues online. Enjoy!
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2 comments
Noto says:
29 December 2009 at 4:27 pm (UTC -5)
Where would the world be today without Batboy?
Colin says:
29 December 2009 at 7:08 pm (UTC -5)
I am proud to say I purchased a Batboy T-shirt from WWN, several years before their sad demise.
I seem to remember hearing of Mexican newspapers and tabloids being the modern-day standard-bearers of sleaze, sensationalism and trash.