I Was Dear Dottie

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, the World's Skinniest Woman and Osama Bin Laden's Clone 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 couple of years. I was ace investigative reporter Jerome Howard. I was the guy who exposed the genetically mutated 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 company who owned WWN (American Media, their motto: "Still checking all our mail for anthrax.") came to own the humor magazine I was a writer on. That was Cracked (R.I.P.). The editor of WWN was a huge fan of Cracked and managed to get installed as editor, just in time to oversee the magazine's plunging readership and budget cutbacks. So while Cracked stumbled along with months growing into many months between issues, the editor figured out a way to try and keep the writing staff together. He offered us writing gigs at WWN.