Bat Boy Is The Canary In The Coal Mine

The demise of Weekly World News may signal the eventual demise of other tabloids like the National Enquirer:

The Enquirer, the archetypal supermarket tabloid, was founded in 1926 as The New York Enquirer with capital from mobster Frank Costello to list illegal lottery numbers. In the 1950s, publisher Generoso Pope Jr. built it into a newsstand hit with a formula of blood and violence, crime scene and accident pictures, and screaming headlines like “I Cut out Her Heart and Stomped on It!” But, by 1967, Pope realized the tabloid’s future lay in suburban supermarkets, so he reined in the shock and gore, replacing it with the familiar formula of celebrity gossip, the occult, and miracle diets. Pressure from competitors pushed the content toward wildly scurrilous – until a landmark 1981 lawsuit won by Carol Burnett suggested to AMI the benefits of fact-checking.

Through the ’80s and ’90s, although forced to curb their worst excesses, The Enquirer and its kin enjoyed business as usual. As the century drew to a close, though, TV shows like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, the entire E! channel, and an overall swing to a tabloid-style celeb obsession in all media from People to cable news, plus the Internet becoming a massive resource of salacious cyber-tattle, had eroded those numbers. The Enquirer enjoyed a certain renaissance with an inside track on both the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. It also survived a post-9/11 anthrax mail attack on AMI’s Florida offices, which killed a photo editor.

Without Bill and O.J. to pull in the readers, however, circulation again began to drop, and in 2003 AMI brought in super-editor Bonnie Fuller, formerly of Glamour and Cosmopolitan and who had recently turned around the fortunes of Us Weekly. But Fuller’s formula – total concentration on celebrity and the elimination of the astrologers, flying saucers, and near-death experiences – proved little more than a short-term containment. Fuller temporarily slowed the rot, but did not reverse it. Now, as The Weekly World News goes under, AMI is reportedly close to $1 billion in debt and posted a $160 million net loss for 2006.