Weekly World News Resuscitated

Michael A. Burstein points out that the Weekly World News has returned from the dead, to a degree. New owner Bat Boy LLC has launched the former weekly tabloid paper as a web site at www.weeklyworldnews.com.

As reported in the New York Times, Neil McGinness has formed a new company, Bat Boy LLC, which bought the defunct publication from American Media. The Times quotes McGinness as saying "I had always been a fan in college. And I grew up in Cleveland at a time when Dennis Kucinich was the mayor, so I believed that UFO's and many other things were possible." McGinness previously worked at IMG Media, the National Lampoon, and Lorne Michaels's Broadway Video.

McGinness continued, "Our view is the dominance of special-effects movies at the box office, and the popularity of Heroes and Lost on prime-time television—shows that the fringe culture is more relvant than ever. And the Weekly World News embraces that fringe culture."

McGinness is currently seeking advertising for the web site, but he hasn't ruled out a return to print as well.

The publication, first founded in 1979, was the home of Bat Boy and other news of the outrageous. SFScope broke the news that it was shutting down in July 2007.