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Satirical Weekly World News folding
UPI
Tue August 7, 2007
BOCA RATON, Florida - The outrageous, Florida-based supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News, is going out of business.
Known for "breaking" stories like Elvis Presley faking his death and living in Kalamazoo, Mich., the lost continent of Atlantis being found near Buffalo and 12 U.S. senators actually being space aliens, the weekly entertained millions of readers in the 1980s.
With a circulation of about 90,000 now, the paper's publisher, American Media, decided to shutter the operation and make the Aug. 27 issue the last, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
"Mainstream journalists read WWN and dreamed about killing the county sewer-system story they were working on and writing about a swamp monster or a 65-pound grasshopper," said Derek Clontz, who was a Weekly World News editor for 15 years. "We were the Beatles of fake journalism."
The Post said most of WWN's writers came from respected newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times.
"It was electrifying," said Sal Ivone, a former New York Daily News reporter who went on to write for WWN. "Every day you'd go into the office and somebody would make you scream with laughter."
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