ALERT THE MEDIA!

The world press stopped the presses last week. No, it wasn’t weapons for Iran and money for the contras . It was the hot news that Sly Stallone filed for divorce from Brigitte Nielsen!

The National Enquirer and the Star actually remade their covers. People and US magazines also went into action. Newsweek and Time leaped to the occasion.

The foreign press had a field day--especially Rupert Murdoch’s normally spicy London Sun, which published such a lurid article that Stallone asked that his publicity rep call us with a fierce denial.

First things first: Calls came from as far away as Australia and Japan and from all over Europe (including Denmark, Brigitte’s homeland) came flooding into Stallone’s Rogers & Cowan publicist, Paul Bloch, to confirm the reports. The phones started ringing at 10 a.m. Monday--and continued past midnight. There were literally “hundreds of calls.”

Fans leaped to their phones to lend support to “Rocky” and ask where they could send their letters.

Some fan calls came from overseas, “but there were also calls from Philly and Long Island and the Midwest,” said Stallone assistant Susan Persily. “The overall tone was, ‘Please tell him we hope he’s not hurting.’ ”

Some callers offered advice. And, mused Persily, a handful of women proposed marriage!

In order to meet deadlines--and be on the newsstands this week--the tabloids and People had only about a day to report/write on the duo’s 20-month-old marriage, marital woes and break-up.

The Star put four writers on the story, “around-the-clock for 24 hours,” said one source.

One watchdog reporter camped out in front of Stallone’s Pacific Palisades home.

People commissioned a Stallone staff of half a dozen.

US, which comes out twice monthly, won’t have its Stallone story on the stands until Aug. 10. So it wouldn’t reveal battle plans, “or someone will scoop us,” said editor Anthea Disney, hinting tantalizingly, “But I can tell you to expect an interview from someone very close to Stallone.”

As for the Enquirer: Some 25 writers were “activated” in order to get “the untold story.”

“But, we pretty much had a lot of our story already done,” bragged a rep. “Back in May, when she was going to file for divorce, we’d written a detailed piece. We had it ready. It just required a little more legwork.”

The Enquirer source said that “for the last six months, we’ve been tracking the problems of this marriage. And we’d long ago printed all the details of their prenuptial agreement.”

The result of all this?

The marital saga will be on the covers of both Enquirer and Star. (On the Enquirer cover, it will be co-billed with Ollie North, who’s the subject of “a special section.”)

Stallone’s spread in People is heralded by the headline, “Rocky Marriage Ends up a Split Decision.” He didn’t make the cover--but then Stallone has historically never been a top-selling cover boy for the magazine. The cover instead goes to Ollie North, along with some other winners of the annual People Readers Poll.

Then there was the London Sun, which raged on about alleged sexual shenanigans by Nielsen.

It generated immediate screams from Stallone, who asked his publicist to call us with a rebuttal: “I am totally outraged by the fictitious allegations made in a London newspaper about my estranged wife, Brigitte Nielsen. She is a totally feminine woman. This kind of filthy and false journalism has no place in our society.”

The “news” in the Sun even sent shock waves through the offices of the Enquirer in Lantana, Fla.

Said an Enquirer source: “What the London press is doing is leaps and bounds ahead of anything happening here. They’re making new tracks in celebrity coverage. We won’t be following them.”

Added the source: “There’s this image of low-brow American tabloids and the high-brow aristocratic British press. What the Sun’s doing should set that image to rest.”

The Enquirer’s competitor, the Star, is also under Murdoch’s ownership, but an insider there said that it’s not following the lead of its British sister, opting instead for a less-scandalous version.

Extra! Extra! We may be continuing to read all about the Stallone marital saga.

The media’s anticipating some hot stuff in ensuing months. (There’s already been speculation that Stallone might return to first wife Sasha; speaking of which, their divorce generated lotsa colorful headlines.)

Meanwhile, Stallone’s preparing to go before the cameras in September for “Rambo III,” which is a war of another sort.