Bat Boy Disappears from Headlines, and a Nation Mourns

It's been a while since a news article made me laugh so hard I cried, but The Washington Post's coverage of the demise of Weekly World News did just that.

As anyone who has been in a supermarket in the last 20 years knows, Weekly World News offered the best available coverage of alien babies, Elvis sightings, and Bat Boy.  My high-school self enjoyed "Dear Dotty," the vicious advice column whose author always mocked the intelligence of the people she tried to help, and often told them that, you know, the world might be better off without them. Hint, hint.

The thing I took away from this article was how much fun it must have been to work for this publication.  Some of the writers came from newspapers like The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and they found a unique philosophy of journalism at WWN. To wit:

Eddie Clontz was the mad genius behind WWN. A 10th-grade dropout from North Carolina and former copy editor at small newspapers, he imbued the WWN newsroom with his unique philosophy of journalism: Don't fact-check your way out of a good story.

"If we get a story about a guy who thinks he's a vampire, we will take him at his word," Clontz told the Philadelphia Inquirer before he died in 2004.

I love that line: Don't fact check your way out of a good story.  Still, in the 80s, the paper tried to keep an ever-shrinking nugget of truth at the center of their reporting.  Yet standards quickly eroded. Or, according to sales figures, they impoved: 

"It wasn't like overnight we decided to start running fiction," Berger says. "We just added a few facts to a story and got away with it, and it went on from there."

WWN's writers had stepped out onto that proverbial "slippery slope" you hear so much about, and they gleefully slid down it, riding right to the bottom, giggling all the way. Soon they were producing "FAMED PSYCHIC'S HEAD EXPLODES" and "ELVIS TOMB IS EMPTY" and "HEAVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUBBLE TELESCOPE," which was illustrated by an actual photo from the Hubble, enhanced just a wee bit to show a shining city so lovely it made dying seem like a small price to pay for admission.

As the stories got more creative, circulation soared, reaching nearly a million copies a week by the end of the '80s. Staffers debated how many of the readers actually believed the stories and how many were hipsters reading it for laughs.

The end came, unsurprisingly, as the result of a corporate buyout and restructuring.  (Isn't it almost too good to believe that the editor who ran WWN into the ground was named David Pecker?) But I suppose this sort of workplace couldn't last:

They worked in an office in the back of the National Enquirer newsroom, behind a partition installed because Eddie Clontz's yelling disturbed the serious journalists at the Enquirer. Actually, everybody yelled. First, somebody would yell out an idea for a headline, then everybody else would yell out better ideas. The yelling was exceeded only by the laughing.

"There were days when I would leave work," Lind says, "with my stomach and my face hurting from laughing all day at the ideas being kicked around."

Fare thee well, Bat Boy. You will be missed.

Comments

[Huffman]

The Lucky Lab kept the WWN posted above their urinals, which is one of the reasons it is my favorite brew pub in Portland. Yes, it will be missed.

[Pam]

Geez, I'm gonna miss bat boy too.

[Daniel]

Hell, maybe Xark could invite the staff to blog here.

[ben]

Well, Dan, that Clontz guy is dead. But "Dead Journalist Returns as Zombie Blogger!!!" makes a nice headline.

[Janet Edens]

Fear not, only the print version is dying. The Web site will continue to follow the trials and tribulations of Bat Boy.

[Daniel]

You laugh, but I have it on good authority that Spibby is actually a space alien and that Sloop is Bigfoot's Cajun Spice Love Child, so a zombie editor from Weekly World News might actually be a step back from the brink of absurdity here.

[Clisby]

Back in the mid-80s I gave my little nephew a copy of the WWN featuring the Loch Ness Monster's new baby. I later found out he took it to school for a current events assignment. I'm sure it was quite the hit.