Elvis Is Alive! Bat Boy Joins The War On Terror! UFOs To Invade Earth On July 5th!
Easily the most popular and well-known weird news magazine out there, the great Weekly World News provides its readers with a weekkly serving of the most outlandish and obviously fake news available. And the best part is, it can be found in nearly every supermaket check-out counter in the USA! WWN's rival The Sun recently changed its format to focus more on fad diets and celebrity gossip, but WWN remains true to its mission of basing an entire weekly publication on made-up "news." Their Web site proclaims what they report is "not really news – or is it?"
But alas, it seems that the venerable WWN has become a victim of the Conspiracy, like so many of us. Due to legal pressure, they have recently been forced to print a disclaimer on their credits page:
Oh, right! Like we really NEEDED that statement to help us tell the difference between fiction and fact! But then again…this world is so crazy, maybe some of the stories printed in WWN really ARE true. And at least the Page 5 Girls are genuine!
Death and Resurrection
In the fall of 2007, the Weekly World News suddenly stopped publishing…and no one knows why. (Maybe it was a conspiracy!) The magazine suddenly announced in its headline that it was the FINAL ISSUE OF THE WEEKLY WORLD NEWS!, and that was it. It may have been killed by the Internet, based on a report in March 2007, when parent company American Media said that sales of WWN in 2006 were "only 83,000 per issue." But even after publication ceased, the Weekly World News refused to die. Its sister tabloid, the Sun, published a WWN section in each issue…and then, in late 2009, the Web site suddenly became active again! It turned out that one of the paper's biggest fans, Neil McGuinness, formed his own company called Bat Boy L.L.C. and bought the name and rights to the Weekly World News. The paper currently exists as a news blog, updated daily, and it covers the subject most near and dear to WWN. An October 2009 article in Famous Monsters of Filmland suggests that the new company plans to expand past the printed page: