Help Wanted
So how does one become a writer for Weekly World News? The answer is surprisingly boring: Pachenko heard they were looking for freelancers and he sent in some WWN style articles he thought they'd dig. What was the WWN answer?
"I was getting drunk at the Algonquin in NYC when I smelled something strange," Pachenko reveals. "I couldn't tell where the odor was coming from until I looked across the darkened bar at a corner table. The candle had just been blown out, so I couldn't see who was sitting there, but I decided I was too drunk to care and headed over. The odor became stronger and I realized why, once I got a good look at who was sitting there: Bat Boy."
As Pachenko continues, "Bat Boy had just returned from Texas where he'd been scorned by one of the Bush twins. He was forlorn and hadn't showered in days. Of course, I learned later that the stink was somehow worse after he showered. Anyway, we ended up getting really drunk together and at some point we prank-called the offices of WWN not realizing that my cell phone number was showing up on their caller ID. When they called back, I was still drunk and pissed and told them they could f**** off or give me a job. For some reason, they did the latter. Guess they liked my attitude."
So how did the lunacy of Weekly World News all begin? How did this wacky publication come into existence? Pachenko says, "I believe it started on a dark and stormy night. I'm afraid that's all I can reveal." However, he adds, "it is a real paper published by the same company that publishes Star, The National Enquirer and several other tabloid rags. And I think the WWN has the same high journalistic standards as those tabloids."
I next asked Pachenko how he finds his stories, or how he creates them. "I generally brainstorm and come up with ideas in batches," he says. "Sometimes an idea will hit me and as I write it down, my mind will start thinking of variations or jump to another idea and I'll just run with it until inspiration peters out. I try to come up with at least five ideas at a time, since I know that of those five there might only be one or two if I'm lucky that are any good.
"I came up with one headline from a Pixies song. The song was "There Goes My Gun" and the headline was: "Cop Actually Trades Gun for a Dozen Donuts!" The sub-heading was: "Hands Over Bullets for Extra Bear Claw." I came up with another one when the Pennsylvania miners were trapped for days. But I had to set it elsewhere, so I wrote:
"Trapped African Diamond Miners Rescued - by Underground Realm of Dwarves!"
Pachenko's editor liked the dwarf story, but he couldn't sell it to the boss running WWN at the time. As Pachenko tells me, there were "regime changes" at WWN, and at one point they tried to take a "more realistic" approach to their stories. A notice was circulated among the freelancers: there were to be no more stories about mermaids, elves, vampires, etc. The only thing they could still write about in that vein was about Bigfoot and aliens because people really believed in them. Needless to say, this new approach at WWN failed miserably, and when that editorial staff got sacked, WWN went back to its regular style.
I asked Pachenko if he felt some people took WWN seriously. Some could possibly feel it's an example of the tabloids becoming totally ridiculous, and maybe that's the idea behind WWN, to point this out to people in an ironic way. Slipping back into facetious mode, Pachenko says, "I don't think people take it seriously enough! Only the WWN dares to print the stories no one else will."
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