​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper but after a while, I was submitting some straight forward fake news stories. 

For some reason, I feel like this story got pitched to me.  I can't imagine thinking up a bubble story.   It's a solid little story and a surprising show business parody at the end.  It's now I started to realize that getting the article sold didn't mean it was going to get featured.  I had some one and two page spreads made up from my stories, so I was surprised this was printed as a 1 column piece.  Oh, well. 

​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  I worked my way in with some straight forward fake news stories. 

This kind of story was inevitable.  Everyone knows about Chuck E. Cheese, right?  The original draw was a various points, animatronic figures would appear on a stage to sing some songs and entertain the customers.  It was cute, but Disneyland it wasn't.  But what if one of them went all West World?  Again, ridiculous situation, but if you include the right quotes from the "eye witnesses" it plays out fine.  I even pulled a twist where the company decides to make rouge robtos part of their new business plan!

​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper but I worked my way in with some straight forward fake news stories.

I feel like now I was getting the hang of things at WWN.  A  the legend goes back forever.  I even made sure to start the story with that.  There was much actual news stories about the black market that deals with ancient artifacts.  Also the usual stories of Mexican drug cartels and their elaborate compounds filled with exotic animals and valuable art and such.  Combining them seemed natural.  I filled with various experts and characters and thought I told a solid story.

​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  After a while I worked my way up with some straight forward fake news stories.

This article is one of my favorites.  I feel like I got to combine current events, social issues and nonsense all into one article.  Stories about spontaneous combustion have been around for centuries.  I think there was an "X-Files" episode about it.  I know there was a "Kolchack: The Night Stalker" episode.  But to link that condition to climate change (especially back when it was called "global warming") just made it one of the strongest and most original articles I submitted.  

Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  I spent a couple of months grappling with Dear Dottie and her advice column.  When I got phased out of that position, I had to try to work my way back in with some straight forward fake news stories. ​

There was a lot of weird stuff going on in President Bush II's terms.  Inflation.  Bank stuff.  Jobs going overseas.  It was a joy to combine outsourced with outer space.  I think I was really pushing the limits with this one, but I just stayed in the logic of the premise and it worked within the WWN universe.

​​​​​​​​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  I spent a couple of months grappling with Dear Dottie and her advice column.  When I got phased out of that position, I had to try to work my way back in with some straight forward news stories.  

Making fun of the hip-hop fashions of 2004.  Couldn't be help.  We were entering the age of "Pull up Your Damn Pants" and it seemed like a topic ready for parody.  The statistics were from make-up departments, much like today's DOGE.  And I did enjoy writing a point/counterpoint over such a pointless topic.

​​​​​​​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  I spent a couple of months grappling with Dear Dottie and her advice column.  When I got phased out of that position, I had to try to work my way back in with some straight forward news stories.  

This is one of those stories that seems so ridiculous that maybe it could happen?  We all know how the Catholic Church is up for change, so what if to appease dieters, they offered lo-cal communion?  Actually, the story kind of worked out backwards from a Cath-listhenics / calisthenics joke I thought up once, kneeling, getting up, crossing, kneeling, and then developed the communion idea from that 

​​​​​​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper.  I spent a couple of months grappling with Dear Dottie and her advice column.  When I got phased out of that position, I had to try to work my way back in with some straight forward news stories.  

Now here's the story I thought Jerome Howard led with.  This (much like the talking pig story) took a real situation and I simply did a twist on it, then let it take me to the absurd but logical conclusion.

The Navy was absolutely using dolphins for military purposes.  And there was a lot a push back about the war in Iran.  So why wouldn't dolphins decide to go rogue?  

Turns out, I nailed it, as a story about Russia dolphins in 2023 would later show.

The story hits all the buttons; anger, defense, high stakes.  It's a pretty good story, if I don't say.

​​​​​​Back in the aughts, Cracked magazine was owned by the same company as the Weekly World News.  During the rocky final years of Cracked, our editor, in an attempt to give the writers a pay check, had us contribute articles to WWN ("the humor magazine that nobody knows is a humor magazine.")  It took me a while to get the hang of the paper at first, but I did eventually start having success getting articles published, under the byline "Jerome Howard."

I wish I could remember where some of these ideas came from, but I don't.  But there was a period of time (the 20th century), when looks were very important and companies had a policy of hiring attractive people.  Once we entered the 21st Century, there was some pushback to that concept, so those people were then fired and replaced with more attractive lackies. 

We were coming to the era when the idea of hostile work environment and the men's club of business were being challenged.  I feel like there was an actual event or lawsuit reported that might have triggered this story but I'm drawing a blank.  I'm actually surprised this was my, er, I mean Jerome's first byline.  I thought there were one or two stories before it.  Nevertheless, we were off and running!

I must have pitched it.  I followed the WWN template; the AP guidelines, quotes, counterpoints and the names of the people involved.  Usually, I'd take a friend's name and twist it.  

Well here's a coincidence; while going through some computer files, I came upon this article I had written back in 2007.  I had forgotten all about it.  When WWN cease publication, I used the moment to hype my relationship with the paper.  Honestly, I forget who I send this out to.  I can't remember if it got picked up anywhere.  And I didn't post it to the blog. 

​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!

Well, an era has passed.  An era filled with bat-boys, aliens, Elvises and the wacky adventures of Bigfoot.  In August (2007), the Weekly World News ceased publication.  Sure, none of you actually bought it (or admitted to it) but you all followed the exploits of the World’s Fattest Man and Bin Laden as you stood in line at Pathmark.  With the demise of the paper, I think now my vow of silence can be broken.  I wrote for the Weekly World News (or World Weekly News, I was never sure) for a number of years.  I was ace investigative reporter Jerome Howard.  I was the guy who reported on the talking pig.  I was Dear Dottie.
     

     At its peak in the 1980s, the paper had 1.2 million readers.  Not bad for an after thought; the paper was born in 1979 when The National Enquirer switched over to full color presses in an effort to gain some respectability (no more “boy eats family” stories for them).  Rather than junk the old black and white presses, they decided to print out-right junk.  The Weekly World News became the home of all the news that didn’t fit.

     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?