SIGHTINGS



Weekly Weird News!
By John Woestendiek - Knight Ridder News Service
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/3/justgo/docs/015092.htm
3-4-00

It's SHOCKING! It's FREAKISH! It's OUTRAGEOUS! But staff members of America's most bizarre tabloid insist they don't make things up.
 
 
LANTANA, FL - If the headlines are true -- and who's to say they're not? -- Tim Skelly shouldn't have worried so much.
 
He was laying out the cover of the the Weekly World News and was fretting over the headline:
 
FACE OF SATAN PHOTOGRAPHED OVER U.S. CAPITOL!
 
``Photographed'' was such a long word that it covered the image -- captured by a ``top-secret thermographic camera'' -- of a snarling, fanged, pointy-eared face emanating from a cloud, an image editors admit had to be, uh, ``enhanced.''
 
That's when editor Eddie Clontz stopped at Skelly's desk and, in a booming North Carolina accent, left no doubt about who runs America's most outlandish supermarket tabloid.
 
``Make it `FACE OF SATAN SEEN OVER U.S. CAPITOL!' '' he ordered. Skelly obliged. ``Now make it bigger. Remember, we need to catch the reader in a couple of seconds. Bigger. Bigger. Good.''
 
Walking away, Clontz added, ``Tim, give it a little drop-head: `Has the Devil Escaped From Hell?' '' He said it again, more slowly. ``Has the Devil Escaped From Hell?''
 
With that, another issue of the Weekly World News -- whose black-and-white, exclamation-point-fueled covers scream from grocery check-out lines across the country -- was ready to go to press.
 
In the tabloid world, last year wasn't just the year that saw the lost continent of Atlantis found (near Buffalo, the News reported), but the year that America's six major supermarket tabs all came under the ownership of one company -- one headed by President Clinton's former deputy treasury secretary, Roger Altman. Really. This part is true. Honest.
 
With American Media Inc. (publisher of the National Enquirer, the Star and the Weekly World News) purchasing Globe Communications (publisher of the Globe, the National Examiner and the Sun), a veritable tabopoly exists. And with all that overlap, particularly with celebrity gossip, staffers wonder if one publication might be reengineered or dropped entirely.
 
Even with its smaller readership (a steady 500,000 copies a week), it's not likely to be the Weekly World News, whose blend of freaks, prophecies, aliens and oddities has drawn a cultlike following, especially among the college-aged.
 
With other tabloids trying to become more respectable, more ``up-market,'' and almost purely celebrity-driven, the News stands out, like Bigfoot at the ballet.
 
``We're the last true tabloid in America,'' Clontz said.
 
The News is to journalism what professional wrestling is to sports. And like pro wrestlers, its staffers -- a mix of misfits, Ivy Leaguers, former mainstream journalists and longtime fringe dwellers who inhabit what has to be one of most bizarre workplaces in America -- don't admit to fakery.
 
They say only that they take a great deal of poetic and artistic license -- that they seek not so much to inform as to entertain.
 
``We never question ourselves out of a good story,'' Clontz said one day last month. ``We don't sit around and make them up, but if we get a story about a guy who thinks he is a vampire, we will take him at his word.
 
``I believe some of it, some of it I don't; it doesn't matter. There is already too little mystery in the world,'' he added, sitting at a desk cluttered with local newspapers and a television tuned to CNN.
 
The News makes no pretense of fairness or accuracy. Instead, it's about promulgating myths -- heroes living on, and villains getting their just deserts. Most of all, it's about selling papers.
 
``We are a throwback. We are a sideshow, and we've got to get people into the circus tent. So we will put the three-headed woman out there, and we will put the 1,000-pound fat guy out there.''
 
``There's never a dull moment here,'' Skelly said. ``I sit here and overhear conversations, and it's not about what happened at council meetings and planning commissions. It's more like `A werewolf? Uh-huh. And how long was its hair? And you have photographs? And they're in focus?' ''
 
 
Making old new again The National Enquirer is located in a secluded, expansive one-story office complex on a lushly landscaped compound in Lantana, Fla.
 
In 1979, the Enquirer became a full-color publication, leaving its old black-ink press idle.
 
The Weekly World News was created that year to keep the old press turning a profit, and for two years it inherited photos and stories that didn't make it into the Enquirer.
 
``It had mostly cast-off stuff -- the B-list celebrities, second-rate photos,'' said Clontz, 52, a 10th-grade dropout and former copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times. When he was hired in 1981, he studied the old tabloids, penny press and dime novels, and came up with a concept. ``We took something old and made it new again.''
 
Today, the Weekly World News, with a full-time in-office staff of about 12, sits in a tiny corner of the Enquirer newsroom -- behind the photo department, past the copy machine and through the partitions installed after complaints about Clontz's bellowing voice.
 
Its walls are covered with covers of the paper and blaring headlines:
 
``BLIND MAN REGAINS SIGHT AND DUMPS UGLY WIFE!''
 
``FLORIDA MAN SCREAMS FROM HIS GRAVE, MY BRAIN IS MISSING!''
 
``12 U.S. SENATORS ARE SPACE ALIENS!''
 
In a cubicle decorated with photos of his girlfriend and his new motorcycle sits R. Neale Lind, 57, who is quick to say he's not the typical Weekly World News reporter.
 
Unlike his colleagues -- one of whom attended Yale, another who was a Washington correspondent for a large newspaper chain -- Lind had no newspaper experience when he was hired seven years ago.
 
Better known as Bob Lind, he had been a ``rock-and-roller'' whose biggest hit, ``Elusive Butterfly,'' came in the '60s. He had also been an Everglades guide and a not-entirely-successful fiction writer.
 
``I love it here,'' he said. ``Think of who you talk to on the average day -- maybe the checker at the grocery, or the gas station attendant. I'm talking to people who have been abducted by aliens or who have seen Bigfoot.
 
``And it pays an awful lot,'' he added. Reporters make $75,000 and up, with most editors into six figures.
 
``We don't look for truth as much as we look for excitement,'' Lind said.
 
Like Lind, art director Dick Kulpa can't be described as a mainstream sort, either.
 
A chain smoker, prone to flicking ashes on himself, Kulpa grew up obsessed with Marvel Comics and Star Trek. He started as a free-lance artist for the News 11 years ago, after serving as a borough council member in a small Illinois town, where he was known to wear superhero costumes to meetings.
 
Divorced and a father of three, Kulpa, 46, is -- depending on whom and what you believe -- either the creator or the discoverer of Bat Boy.
 
According to the News, which has trademarked Bat Boy's name and image, the 2-foot-tall, 19-pound creature with razor-sharp teeth and the strength of an ape was captured by a research team in the Shenandoah mountains.
 
Later he escaped from a research facility -- ``a tragedy beyond measure,'' zoologist Ron Dillon was quoted as saying. Like many experts quoted in News stories, he is not identified as being affiliated with any school or organization, and is impossible to find.
 
Often, when such an expert is pictured, the photo is actually a ``generic'' -- one of hundreds on file of regular people who consented, for $50, to have their photos used in any capacity the News sees fit.
 
Other times, they are real people in real photos -- as in the recent story, ``TEXAS GAL CAN STICK THREE POOL BALLS IN HER MOUTH AT A TIME!''
 
Kulpa won't admit Bat Boy was an artist's rendering, or a heavily retouched photograph. He does say one can do amazing things with photographs on a computer nowadays.
 
 
Balance not needed ``Balance is not particularly necessary in what we do,'' said managing editor Susan Jimison, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who had been an Enquirer medical reporter.
 
``We're totally outraged, or we're totally heartbroken, but we're never `on the one hand this, but on the other hand that,' '' Jimison said.
 
Besides its weekly mishmash of stranger-than-fiction stories, the News has regular features: the bikini-clad Page 5 Girl; Dear Dotti, the cranky advice columnist; and the even-crankier Ed Anger; and Serena Sabak, ``America's sexiest psychic,'' who offers readers her ``incredible healing power.''
 
In one issue in December, which featured a life-size picture of the bottoms of Serena's feet, readers were invited to put their feet on the photo -- at 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve -- to be cured of what ails them. Other years they've been offered cures by putting their hands on her hands, their rear ends on her rear end.
 
How many readers really believe that -- or, for that matter, the rest of what the News prints?
 
Probably a tiny minority. ``Our readers aren't dumb,'' Clontz said.
 
Instead, he likes to think that -- whether they're reading that a half-human/half-alligator has been discovered, or, as they did in its best-selling issue ever, that Elvis is still alive -- they are willing to entertain the possibility.
 
Or, at least, let the possibility entertain them. _____
 
 
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