World news is a general term for journalism about events occurring in countries outside of one’s own. It is often distinguished from national news (which focuses on the politics and issues of one’s own nation) and sometimes from other types of news reporting, such as sports and weather. World news may also refer to a specific subfield of journalism, such as war reporting or coverage of multilateral organizations.
The Weekly World News was a tabloid newspaper that ran from 1979 until 2007. The paper published mostly fictional “news” articles with an approach to news reporting that often verged on the satirical. Its distinctive black-and-white cover designs became pop-culture images widely used in various media. The editor of WWN, Eddie Clontz, a 10th grade dropout from North Carolina, cultivated an eccentric style that at times descended into outright absurdity.
WWN’s anchors, including Bob Bender and Janet Reno, were known for their improvisational humor. One memorable segment was a series of musical performances featuring local jazz bands that came to the studio to play a song on air. Another was a quiz show format called World News Knows, in which the anchors would read off trivia facts and compare them to the audience’s answers during commercial breaks.
The last season of World News Now began in September 2020. Network O&O stations began to drop the program in favor of more varied weekday late night programming, such as a rebroadcast of Live with Kelly and Ryan and Daytime Jeopardy! NBC owned-and-operated station WPVI in Philadelphia, PA, replaced World News Now with its own spinoff program World Tonight in December 2022. In January 2021, NBC O&O WNBC in New York City dropped the program completely, replacing it with an hour-long rebroadcast of This Week. Other ABC O&Os, such as WDAZ-TV in Grand Forks and WOAY-TV in Oak Hill, West Virginia, continued to run the program on a tape delayed loop until their local news programs began.