
I was going through I period where someone had suggested I need to put more of myself in my prose. I tried to go the Erma Bombeck/Dave Barry route and write about my experiences. In the end, no one cared about that stuff either. But, I was in that frame of mind when WWN went belly up, so I tried to sum up my experiences in a jaunty tale.
It's a pretty decent encapsulation, and I seem more sure of my memories of things back then. It's a good companion piece to my WWN memories and blog posts of late. I hope you think so, too.
Thanks for reading!
I was Dear Dottie

Now, oddly, the same people who owned WWN came to own the humor magazine Cracked (R.I.P.) I was a contributing writer there. The editor of the WWN was a huge fan of Cracked and got the parent company (American Media, their motto: “Now checking all our mail for anthrax.”) to let him be editor. That didn’t quite go as planned. So while Cracked stumbled along with months growing into many months between issues, they decided to try and keep the writing staff together by offering them writing gigs at WWN.
Always up for a gig (especially since I had just gotten comfortable using the word “gig”), I submitted some stuff. None of it quite met their standards. And they did have them. They followed AP prose style. All their articles had to be reported as fact. No obvious jokes. The more outrageous the subject, the more detailed the facts had to be. And if the story sounded that unbelievable, then, by all means, have a named expert quoted as saying “this is impossible.” That was one of the keys to their success. The stories always lurked on the outskirts of doubt at the intersection of plausible and fiction. Also, to eliminate the chance of someone actually having first-hand knowledge to refute a story, they told us to dateline the article in an obscure region of the country or overseas (“Remember,” our editor told us, “It’s the Weekly World News”).
Anyway, my attempts at plausible fiction were---what’s the term---Lame. In the end I was offered the gig of their advice columnist, Dottie Primrose. It was much like “Dear Abby” if Abby were a snotty harpy who despised her readers and only answered made-up questions that she wrote herself. So with only a word processor and my twisted wits, I got in touch with my inner-bitch and began pounding out “Dear Dottie” columns. I tackled questions concerning fat people on airplanes, crude dudes who couldn’t get dates, despondent telemarketers and witch wedding protocol. No matter the topic, every column had one common theme; people are really quite stupid. I managed to vent a lot of anger through that column.
Not long after, there were some management changes. The old Cracked-crew was out and some new editors were named. I was taken off active Dottie duty but now had gotten a handle on the WWN news style and was able to launch the career of my nom-de-tabloid, ace reporter Jerome Howard. I uncovered the outsourcing of jobs to outer space, the final hiding place of the Holy Grail (a bus locker in Mexico City) and the discovery of the dangers of secondhand cholesterol. I reported on rouge icebergs bent on maritime revenge, outbreaks of Spontaneous Human Combustion due to global warning and low-carb communion wafers for the weight-watching Catholic. Man, you can’t make this stuff up. Well, actually, you can.
The paper’s readership straddled the trailer parks and the college campuses, each getting what they needed from it. When college kids found out I wrote for the paper (no mean feat as I didn’t make a habit of telling anyone. Ever.), they were impressed (go figure). When real letters started coming in for “Dear Dottie” they were very serious. They took offense to my rude answers to poor souls seeking help, they asked for real advice, they sent in recipes and a couple proposed marriage. They weren’t my type. I wonder if my replacement took them up on it?
The Weekly World News became a pop-culture icon, giving us the award-winning off-Broadway play, Bat Boy: The Musical, the plot device of Mike Myers' “So I Married an Axe Murderer” and showing up in “Men in Black,” as being the home to the "best damn investigative reporting on the planet." In 1992, WWN’s alien-in-resident, P’Lod, was photoshopped shaking hands with Bill Clinton and then George Bush. And each acknowledged the tribute to the Main Stream Media on the campaign trail.
WWN had long presented itself as covering the stories nobody else thought to. Its slogan was “Nothing but the True.” But as readership dropped, a new regime was brought it. The offices were moved from Florida to New York and suddenly there were subtle changes. For starters, they now ran a disclaimer, “The reader should suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment." Who puts a disclaimer on the truth? The tone changed. Stories had to have consistency from issue to issue. I had a story spiked that oil companies had had discovered living dinosaurs in the Amazon and planned to killed them all to make more oil because the editor’s brother had been doing a series of articles about an explorer’s adventures in the Amazon and in one episode he found dinosaurs. Apparently, the two concepts conflicted. The paper formed a clique of writers and the opportunities for freelancers like myself dried up. I got one or two further articles in the paper, but my time had passed. And now the WWN’s time has passed. Ha!*
Why is it gone? Maybe people can get their fake news on the Internet (RushLimbaugh.com). Maybe people who were in on the joke didn’t like that fact that the paper was now letting everyone in on the joke. And maybe the people who believed it was possible didn’t like that it was just a joke. Maybe people just don’t want their news in black & white anymore.
Good-bye Bat-Boy, P’Lod, and Bigfoot. Farewell Jerome and Dottie and the hussy they brought in to replace her. And mostly, good-by supplemental income. You’ll all be missed.
*Bitter? Who me?