"I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!" A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact

Sloan, Bill. "I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!" A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001. 251 pp. $25.

If he learned nothing else during his years in tabloid newspapering, Bill Sloan learned the power of an intriguing headline. In "I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!"the one-time investigative reporter at the Dallas Times Herald delivers a delightfully trashy history of the tabs with the title taken from an actual front-page banner in the National News Extra in 1974. He tells a rich, cinematic, and engagingly human story in a lively and thoughtful style.

While not an "academic study," Sloan's work offers a serious look at a neglected area of journalism history: the men (and, indeed, they were all men) who created and developed the supermarket tabloid. His important ethnographies include a dozen interviews with former tabloid newspaper insiders, editors, and reporters, and he draws upon his experience as an editor/writer at the Nat/ona/Enquirer, Midnight (now Globe), and the National Tattler. Only those who have "been there, done that" can accurately paint the surreal picture of this culturally important, albeit outrageous, multimillion dollar industry. There is plenty of fascinating information on the methods of tabloid production...