Lengthy earlier than it turned a pejorative to explain claims you do not like, “faux information” was a comedy style. Its flagship for years was The Onion, a satirical weekly newspaper based in 1988 that grew to turn into a cultural establishment.
Calling itself “America’s Best Information Supply,” The Onion revealed realistic-looking information reviews with information both skewed or invented for satirical impact. Many of those articles had been “tales the place individuals are seemingly speaking to reporters the place there isn’t any rationale for a reporter to be there,” as James daSilva, who maintains a Substack publication dedicated to the publication, put it in 2013. This turned The Onion‘s signature “space man” template, as in “Space Man At all times Nostalgic For 4 Years In the past,” “Unattractive Man Simply Like A Brother To Space Girl,” or “Space Cockroach Fucking Big.” As with a lot good comedy, decorum and good style weren’t required. A working example: “Ugly Lady Killed: Nation Unshaken By Not-So-Tragic Dying.”
That acerbic wit additionally focused public figures. In January 2013, when a prepresidential Donald Trump was spreading unfounded rumors about then-President Barack Obama’s birthplace, The Onion ran an op-ed purportedly written by Trump, titled “When You are Feeling Low, Simply Keep in mind I am going to Be Useless In About 15 Or 20 Years.” (The piece prompted Trump’s lawyer to threaten a defamation go well with.) The Onion used its signature tone to deal with nationwide tragedies, too. Its first difficulty after September 11 ran a surprisingly shifting story about attempting to really feel useful within the face of sorrow, headlined “Not Understanding What Else To Do, Girl Bakes American-Flag Cake.”
The paper was successful, increasing in simply over a decade from a two-man faculty paper to an operation with 50 full-time staff and a print circulation of over 200,000. By 2006, its web site acquired 4 million distinctive guests per 30 days. It later branched out into audio and video manufacturing, gaining important video visitors when YouTube was nonetheless a novelty. It spawned spinoff websites, corresponding to ClickHole, which satirizes traffic-chasing retailers like BuzzFeed and Upworthy.
With recognition got here affect. After Jon Stewart took over The Each day Present in 1999, he employed a former Onion editor as head author; they turned Comedy Central’s nightly broadcast right into a pop-culture juggernaut that concurrently coated present occasions and satirized TV information reveals, incomes Stewart the honorific “essentially the most trusted title in faux information.” Many articles from The Onion and its spinoffs have turn into memes: When a public determine expresses an uncharacteristically salient thought, for instance, you must anticipate to see folks sharing the headline”Heartbreaking: The Worst Particular person You Know Simply Made A Nice Level“—or simply the immediately recognizable photograph that ClickHole ran with the story. The Onion‘s “Medication Win Drug Conflict” headline turned so iconic that they promote it as a T-shirt.
However as conventional media retailers struggled and died, The Onion additionally noticed its share of ups and downs: layoffs, restructuring, and acquisitions. The paper well-known for satirizing the media skilled the identical trajectory as these it was lampooning.
But in contrast to many legacy retailers, The Onion at present seems to be thriving: After being bought for elements and shuffled between personal fairness stability sheets, it was bought in April 2024 by followers eager to revive the paper to its former glory. The brand new house owners are bullish on the publication’s future, at the same time as they face a panorama that has grown largely detached to media retailers. May America’s main outlet of explicitly faux information supply a imaginative and prescient of the American information media’s future?
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The Onion started in a dorm room in August 1988, the creation of two college students on the College of Wisconsin–Madison. The next yr, they bought the paper for lower than $20,000. One of many consumers, Scott Dikkers—a cartoonist who had been considered one of its first hires—turned the editor in chief, a job he says he was roughly performing already.
On the time, The Onion was printed weekly in black and white, and distributed totally free round campus. All income got here from advert gross sales, and early cowl pages had restaurant coupons printed alongside the underside. The format was a “hodgepodge” of types, Dikkers says: “We had been parodying the Weekly World Information, The Solar, these humorous grocery retailer tabloids.” There have been additionally cartoons and satirical contests; its hottest recurring function was “Drunk of the Week,” through which staffers would discover a well-lubricated patron in a Madison bar on Friday night time and take their image with a plaque to “have fun” the achievement.
“We did not have design tips—we did not have a constant headline font or something,” Dikkers recollects. “It did not seem like a newspaper. It appeared like a wacky faculty humor publication.”
However Dikkers hoped to show The Onion into greater than only a faculty paper. In 1995, he spearheaded an entire inventive overhaul: Gone was the chaotically shifting model, changed by a constant aesthetic that resembled an actual newspaper. The covers would print in coloration, mimicking full-color, image-heavy broadsheets like USA As we speak, and the articles would make use of a dry, newsy writing model akin to the Related Press.
The brand new tone would turn into one other Onion signature. “Part of the humor is within the stress between what’s being stated and the way it’s being stated,” then–Managing Editor Robert Siegel, who developed the brand new writing model, instructed the Los Angeles Occasions in 1999. “In the event you take one thing you would not usually learn in a newspaper, and write it in that hack, deadpan AP model with out ever winking, there is a comedic stress, a juxtaposition at work that makes it humorous.”
Owing to this dry supply, articles had been generally mistaken for reality—maybe the best praise a satirist can obtain. In Might 2002, The Onion revealed “Congress Threatens To Depart D.C. Except New Capitol Is Constructed,” lampooning skilled sports activities groups that threaten to relocate except taxpayers construct them a brand new stadium; the story included a cartoon diagram of a brand new Capitol constructing with a retractable stadium roof. Days later, the Beijing Night Information translated and reposted the story as reality, even utilizing the identical picture. In 2011, The Onion revealed “Deliberate Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex,” a couple of fictitious Kansas facility that “will enable the group to terminate unborn lives with an effectivity by no means earlier than thought doable.” Then-Rep. John Fleming (R–La.) shared the article on Fb, bemoaning “abortion by the wholesale.”
The professionalized Onion proved profitable, with broad nationwide enchantment. Whereas the paper remained free, it opened distribution workplaces in main cities throughout North America. It additionally despatched copies and free subscriptions to Hollywood expertise companies; Dikkers reviews that one recipient, the comedy musician “Bizarre Al” Yankovic, “actually favored it and he instructed all his buddies,” offering some early cultural cachet.
The American newspaper business was additionally booming. In 1997, simply two years after The Onion took a swipe at USA As we speak by aping its structure, USA As we speak‘s mum or dad firm Gannett loved a 26.6 % pretax revenue margin; as an entire, publicly traded newspaper corporations averaged almost 20 % margins that yr, whereas U.S. manufacturing averaged 7.6 % margins.
In these days, newspapers had lengthy been thought of a protected funding. After World Conflict II, with the arrival of tv, many smaller native newspapers closed or merged with a competing paper, however the publications that survived sometimes thrived, with annual revenue margins between 20 % and 40 %. Papers had subscribers, however revenue was principally pushed by promoting; on the peak in 2005, newspaper adverts netted $49 billion, making up 82 % of papers’ complete income.
Trendy readers could discover it laborious to consider, however on the time, newspapers had been a money cow. The early days of the web solely supercharged the pattern.
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In 1996, with a weekly print circulation of 100,000, The Onion went on-line—principally to defend its mental property. Even with the mass web in its infancy, Onion articles went viral as early net customers shared humorous headlines throughout e mail chains and Usenet boards, with out attribution. (One notably fashionable instance, written amid struggle within the Yugoslav area: “Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia: Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny To Be First Recipients.”)
The Onion was a pure match for the web “simply by the character of a information story’s inverted-pyramid construction,” Wired‘s Mike Tanner wrote in 1997. “Surfers can benefit from the web site as a listing of unlikely headlines, get the kernel of the joke in a narrative’s lead, or learn as deeply into a chunk as they’ve an inclination for.” The Onion was creating content material good for social media, a decade earlier than Fb or Twitter went reside.
Take, for instance, the November 2008 Onion article, “26-Yr-Outdated To See Each Asshole He Ever Went To Excessive College With On Night time Earlier than Thanksgiving.” The headline by itself is humorous and relatable, however studying on yields additional gems: “For the fifth straight yr,” the article begins, using a “NEW YORK” dateline for an additional air of authenticity, “Jordan McCabe will return dwelling for the vacations and spend the night time earlier than Thanksgiving operating into each smug and unlikable asshole he ever went to highschool with, the 26-year-old reported Monday.” Readers who keep to the top are rewarded with a pleasant capper: “A number of Marshall Excessive College alumni have expressed related misgivings about operating into former classmates on the night time earlier than Thanksgiving. ‘I am unable to consider McCabe is coming again,’ stated native resident Ricky Prepare dinner. ‘That man’s such a fuckin’ asshole.'”
The Onion thrived on-line. By 2001, 5 years after the web site launched, it logged greater than 750,000 distinctive month-to-month guests. In the meantime, print circulation doubled.
That very same yr, The Onion moved from Madison to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, in what The New York Occasions known as “a part of a plan to increase from merely a humor newspaper right into a full manufacturing firm.” It moved once more in 2005, to what the Occasions known as “an ethereal new house in SoHo.” New workplaces introduced new studio house, enabling enlargement into each audio and video. The paper began Onion Radio Information, a minutelong each day radio phase that topped obtain charts the week it premiered on podcast platforms.
In 2007, simply months after Google acquired YouTube and with streaming video in its infancy, the paper launched the Onion Information Community web site, that includes quick movies spoofing cable information. Inside 18 months, it acquired greater than 5 million month-to-month video views. Initially of 2011, two Onion-helmed reveals premiered on cable TV: a half-hour Onion Information Community on IFC, and the SportsCenter parody Onion SportsDome on Comedy Central.
It was a banner time for digital media. Vice had began in 1994 as a free Montreal punk journal; by the top of 2009, it was a burgeoning Brooklyn media empire. Amid nine-figure investments from such corporations as Disney and Information Corp, Vice Media would proceed to increase, launching a information division and a cable community, and profitable a number of Emmy and Peabody Awards for its TV documentaries. It additionally considerably grew its actual property footprint, within the course of displacing a number of beloved Brooklyn music venues by taking on their constructing (and within the course of netting an estimated $6.5 million in state incentives).
The gossip web site Gawker operated out of its proprietor’s Manhattan loft earlier than shifting to a SoHo walk-up in 2008, then a three-floor workplace house on Fifth Avenue in 2014—all on the idea of advert income, pushed by tens of tens of millions of month-to-month web page views throughout each its flagship web site and quite a few spinoffs. BuzzFeed launched in 2006 as a devoted aggregator of viral tendencies earlier than later increasing its remit with BuzzFeed Information, a full-fledged newsroom that gained a Pulitzer and was a finalist for 3 others. In 2014, Vice Media reported annual promoting revenues of $175 million, whereas Pew Analysis estimated BuzzFeed‘s at $60 million and Gawker Media’s at $15 million to $20 million. That very same yr, the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz valued BuzzFeed at $850 million.
There appeared to be no higher time to be a digital media outlet. However as they’d quickly discover out, success cannot final perpetually.
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In September 2011, after a decade in New York, The Onion introduced its newsroom would transfer as soon as once more, this time to Chicago. Then-COO Mike McAvoy instructed The Atlantic this was a cost-saving measure: The company workplace was already positioned there, and moreover, Illinois provided a movie manufacturing tax incentive that might apply to net movies. However Onion options editor Joe Backyard instructed The Huffington Submit the workers was “a bit bit blindsided” by the information. Of the paper’s 16 full-time writers and editors, solely 5 made the transfer. Throughout the relocation course of, after only a yr on the air, IFC canceled Onion Information Community. Comedy Central had canceled Onion SportsDome the earlier yr after airing solely 10 episodes.
In Chicago, The Onion refocused its efforts as a digital-first publication. “Every part concerning the Onion is larger and sooner than it was a yr in the past” and it “publishes twice as a lot content material,” wrote Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo. On the similar time, Manjoo famous that—like Stewart’s The Each day Present—the paper was turning into “a bit scoldy, oversmart, and missing a lot nuance. In an try to make a viral joke, the brand new Onion usually makes a straightforward one.”
In 2013, The Onion solidified its digital-first standing by ending its free printed paper. The distribution community had already shrunk to simply three main cities, from almost two dozen at its top. (“Sources near print, the tactic of making use of ink to paper with the intention to convey info to a mass viewers, have confirmed that the declining medium handed away early Thursday morning,” the paper “reported” earlier that yr. “The influential technique of communication was 1,803.”)
Discontinuing the print version “will make little distinction to the underside line,” Lynne Marek of Crain’s Chicago Enterprise wrote on the time: The publication was more and more targeted on “content material manufacturing, together with video, for the Internet,” together with partnerships with established manufacturers to develop promoting campaigns. However this proved short-lived: In October 2015, amid layoffs, The Onion introduced it was in search of a purchaser. “We’ve got much less demand” for promoting and branded content material, Onion COO Kurt Mueller famous in a workers memo. “There’s demand, however we simply overestimated what the demand is.”
It was a tricky time for a lot of digital media corporations. In 2023, simply six years after attaining a $5.7 billion valuation, Vice Media filed for chapter; it could finally settle for a buyout from its collectors for $350 million. “Vice had a pitch—we all know the best way to interact younger folks—however they by no means discovered a strategy to flip that pitch right into a enterprise,” one media analyst instructed Press Gazette. BuzzFeed additionally shuttered its information division in 2023, simply two years after profitable its Pulitzer; the corporate had misplaced 90 % of its worth since going public two years earlier.
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The Onion then entered a interval confronted by many information retailers: acquisition. The Spanish-language broadcaster Univision bought a controlling stake in January 2016; that very same yr, it snapped up all of Gawker Media’s non-Gawker properties in a fireplace sale, when a nine-figure invasion-of-privacy judgment pressured the gossipmonger into chapter 11. Univision later bundled these holdings into a brand new media firm, which a personal fairness agency bought in 2019 and named G/O Media.
Over the subsequent 4 years, G/O Media shuttered two websites and offloaded a number of others. Two Onion spinoffs, The A.V. Membership and ClickHole, had been bought to the publication Paste and the makers of the sport Playing cards Towards Humanity, respectively. In January 2024, Digiday reported that G/O Media was trying to promote all its remaining belongings—with a specific emphasis on The Onion.
This, too, is a pattern affecting company media, as giant corporations gobble up smaller retailers. In the Eighties, many giant firms with no apparent journalistic purview had purchased up main media retailers whereas newspaper conglomerates acquired dozens of smaller native papers. The distinction at present is profitability. Gone are the times when Gannett might pay $305 million to amass two Louisville newspapers, safe within the data that the papers had beforehand averaged 12.6 % revenue margins. Now, digital retailers wrestle and legacy newspapers wither. The place Gannett as soon as loved wholesome double-digit working margins, it recorded a $6 million working loss within the third quarter of 2024. A 2022 report by Northwestern College’s Medill College of Journalism famous that since 2015, greater than a fourth of America’s newspapers had closed—and by 2025, that determine was on monitor to be a 3rd.
The twenty first century introduced personal fairness corporations into the combo, buying struggling information retailers and attempting to show them round to be bought for a revenue. A 2023 paper from New York College’s Stern College of Enterprise discovered that “personal fairness possession is related to a decrease likelihood of newspaper closure”; on the similar time, the authors discovered {that a} native newspaper’s acquisition by personal fairness led to declines in “civic engagement and political participation,” “information content material about native authorities,” “absolutely the quantity of native information,” and “employment of editors and reporters.”
However for The Onion, issues all of the sudden began to lookup: The paper was bought once more in April 2024 to what G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller known as “4 digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy-based content material.”
The brand new house owners introduced again the print version, although it was now provided by mail to subscribers slightly than distributed totally free. Govt Editor Jordan LaFlure instructed The New York Occasions that he hoped the print version might enchantment to youthful readers the identical method vinyl data have a distinct segment in an age of streaming music. The Onion took a shot on the Grey Girl in its redebut difficulty with the article, “‘New York Occasions’ To Stop Publication.” (“With the struggling newspaper admitting this was the ultimate nail in its coffin, The New York Occasions introduced this week that it could completely stop publication, saying there was no method it might compete with The Onion‘s newly relaunched print version.”)
Ben Collins, The Onion‘s new CEO, says many web media corporations within the 2010s “got here into a number of money in a short time and simply form of threw it on the wall.” He says the brand new management hopes to desert lots of the business’s unhealthy habits, like catering to Fb algorithms or chasing clicks on the expense of content material. He likens The Onion below personal fairness possession to a canine in an animal shelter, saying “the canine was achieved being within the fucking crate.”
“The overwhelming majority of their revenue was from programmatic promoting from these bizarre chumboxes,” Collins says, referring to adverts that serve up spam and clickbait. He says the “workers mandate” previous to the acquisition was to prioritize “jokes in slideshows,” which require readers to click on by way of a number of pages per article and thereby see a number of adverts.
The brand new guard saved your complete workers and reinvested in initiatives that had been left to languish, corresponding to video manufacturing. In addition they made extra audacious strikes: In late 2024, the paper gained the rights to conspiracy-monger Alex Jones’ Infowars, together with all its holdings and logos, at a chapter public sale. They intend to relaunch Infowars as a parody of conspiracists, although courts have since stalled the sale.
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For now, the shift appears to be working. Persons are subscribing to the newspaper, and Collins says the video staff is “self-sufficient” from YouTube monetization. On Election Day 2024, he notes, The Onion had “the primary trending video on YouTube…above Beyoncé.” The video: an Onion Information Community sketch through which an election analyst assesses the state of the race through the use of an enormous cable information–model touchscreen to scrutinize a single Pennsylvania swing voter, drilling right down to assess his voting patterns on a mobile degree—earlier than lastly zooming all the best way out “to the perimeters of our cosmos, the place we see finally how meaningless this entire race actually is, and the way insignificant all of our tiny little lives actually are.”
May The Onion‘s newfound success supply any recommendation for different information retailers and media corporations struggling to adapt to the digital world?
“We’re clearly an edge case right here as a result of we’re a silly faux information web site, and that is nice,” Collins advises. “However do not be afraid of your individual shadow….In the event you’re a newspaper that is withstood 150, 200 years of these things…it is an incredible feat. Lean into that and lean into the folks you have already employed and the folks that you simply’re attempting to speak to.”
Collins advocates a mannequin through which readers and content material suppliers interact extra straight with each other. “You are not going to be a mega firm monolith,” he says. “You are not going to be like MGM within the Forties, however you are going to have the ability to make the factor that you simply need to make. That is what I might say to everyone else, is simply, do not you just like the product that you simply work on all day lengthy? Showcase that stuff. Be as in love with it as individuals are with consuming it.”
