June 7, 2005
Elvis more alive than Tabloids! Film at 11:00
A change in the force - as the Broward-Palm Beach New Times reports:ELVIS LIVES!Next, we will hear that Bat Boy is panhandling on the Miami streets living in a cardboard shack...
And South Florida's Tabloid Valley vanishes.
Checkout lanes at grocery stores are all the same. Behind the rows of gum and breath mints are America's most delicious impulse buys: tabloid newspapers.Cellulite Stars!You've thumbed through them. You might have even bought one and gawked at photos of Janet in a thong, Jack with his paramour, and Dubya with his pair o' twins. Maybe you've even tested one of those miracle diets.
Drug Collapse!
Angelina Rejects Brad!
Did Britney's Hubby Cheat?
Slater's Stripper Obsession Drove Wife Away!
Lisa Marie Presley Engaged!
For the past 30 years, the epicenter of pay-any-price, play-any-story journalism has been South Florida. The suburban stretch of Interstate 95 from Lantana to Boca Raton has long been known as Tabloid Valley, a place where scandal-, celebrity-, and money-obsessed reporters perfected checkbook journalism between sips of single-malt scotch.
But Tabloid Valley is disappearing. All of the major scandal sheets -- the National Enquirer, Globe, Star, and National Examiner -- have been consolidated into one company, American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, and in the past decade have seen plummeting circulation. Now, the tabloid of all tabloids is packing up. Later this month, the National Enquirer, which came to sleepy Lantana in 1971, will move to New York City. It will leave behind a history in South Florida that includes helping to knock Gary Hart from the 1988 presidential race, breaking the news of neighbor Rush Limbaugh's OxyContin addiction, and receiving a deadly anthrax-laced letter.
Behind it all is a story of unscrupulous journalists, illicit sex, Mafiosi, and a murder-for-hire plot.
It's a Shocker!
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