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The Web Claims Another Casualty Of Publishing -- The Weekly World News

I read with much sadness today in the Washington Post that the Weekly World News -- the infamous tabloid that ran such brilliant trash news items as the birth of Bat Boy -- this month will close its tatty print doors for good.

I have to admit that in the days before The Onion, Weekly World News was the best bet for a laugh, especially if you were stuck in a long line at the local grocery store.

Here is a look at the quality, ersatz "journalism" that defined WWN:

Eddie Clontz kept telling writers: You've got to give people a reason to believe. To do that, [Joe] Berger says, they would write their weirdest stories in a very straight, just-the-facts-ma'am style. And they'd quote experts explaining how this strange event could occur. Sometimes the experts actually existed.

"I remember a story about a guy who went on a diet, and he got so hungry that he chased a dwarf down the street with a hatchet because he mistook the dwarf for a chicken," Berger recalls. "I'm pretty sure I wrote that story."

He's also pretty sure it was totally fictitious. But it had to seem true.

"We would explain to people how it was possible that a guy could get so hungry that he'd mistake a dwarf for a chicken," Berger says. "We'd interview a psychiatrist about it and quote him. And if we couldn't find one, we'd 'find' one."

Unlike The Onion or other, newer forms of online satire, the WWN was intended to be taken seriously by its readers. Now, I don't claim to know how many people actually believed anything that the WWN published, but in theory, that's how it was meant to be taken. This intentional, unintentional irony gave WWN an extra layer of satiracal goodness that its more outrightly sarcastic offspring have never been able to capture.

Regardless, today's satire Web site -- along with competition from link blogs, YouTube, and other online sources of goofy content -- stole WWN's mojo and it never recovered.

RIP WWN, I'll miss you, especially when I am stuck in the checkout line.

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