…this report, the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won’t miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that’s difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news evolved into a house of mirrors–they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn’t know you knew, and you pretended they didn’t know you knew.

It’s amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN’s end may have come when it hired my ol’ acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on “Bat Boy,” a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper’s cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge’s arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown.