Long before it became a pejorative to describe claims you don't like, "fake news" was a comedy genre. Its flagship for years was The Onion, a satirical weekly newspaper founded in 1988 that grew to become a cultural institution.
Calling itself "America's Finest News Source," The Onion published realistic-looking news reports with facts either skewed or invented for satirical effect. Many of these articles were "stories where people are seemingly talking to reporters where there's no rationale for a reporter to be there," as James daSilva, who maintains a Substack newsletter devoted to the publication, put it in 2013. This became The Onion's signature "area man" template, as in "Area Man Always Nostalgic For Four Years Ago," "Unattractive Man Just Like A Brother To Area Woman," or "Area Cockroach Fucking Huge." As with much good comedy, decorum and good taste were not required. A case in point: "Ugly Girl Killed: Nation Unshaken By Not-So-Tragic Death."
That acerbic wit also targeted 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're Feeling Low, Just Remember I'll Be Dead In About 15 Or 20 Years." (The piece prompted Trump's attorney to threaten a defamation suit.) The Onion used its signature tone to address national tragedies, too. Its first issue after September 11 ran a surprisingly moving tale about trying to feel helpful in the face of sorrow, headlined "Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake."
The paper was a success, expanding in just over a decade from a two-man college paper to an operation with 50 full-time employees and a print circulation of over 200,000. By 2006, its website received 4 million unique visitors per month. It later branched out into audio and video production, gaining significant video traffic when YouTube was still a novelty. It spawned spinoff sites, such as ClickHole, which satirizes traffic-chasing outlets like BuzzFeed and Upworthy.
With popularity came influence. After Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999, he hired a former Onion editor as head writer; they turned Comedy Central's nightly broadcast into a pop-culture juggernaut that simultaneously covered current events and satirized TV news shows, earning Stewart the honorific "the most trusted name in fake news." Many articles from The Onion and its spinoffs have become memes: When a public figure expresses an uncharacteristically salient thought, for example, you should expect to see people sharing the headline"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point"—or just the instantly recognizable photo that ClickHole ran with the story. The Onion's "Drugs Win Drug War" headline became so iconic that they sell it as a T-shirt.
But as traditional media outlets struggled and died, The Onion also saw its share of ups and downs: layoffs, restructuring, and acquisitions. The paper famous for satirizing the media experienced the same trajectory as those it was lampooning.
Yet unlike many legacy outlets, The Onion today appears to be thriving: After being sold for parts and shuffled between private equity balance sheets, it was purchased in April 2024 by fans keen to restore the paper to its former glory. The new owners are bullish on the publication's future, even as they face a landscape that has grown largely indifferent to media outlets. Could America's leading outlet of explicitly fake news offer a vision of the American news media's future?
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The Onion began in a dorm room in August 1988, the creation of two students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The following year, they sold the paper for less than $20,000. One of the buyers, Scott Dikkers—a cartoonist who had been one of its first hires—became the editor in chief, a role he says he was more or less performing already.
At the time, The Onion was printed weekly in black and white, and distributed for free around campus. All revenue came from ad sales, and early cover pages had restaurant coupons printed along the bottom. The format was a "hodgepodge" of styles, Dikkers says: "We were parodying the Weekly World News, The Sun, those funny grocery store tabloids." There were also cartoons and satirical contests; its most popular recurring feature was "Drunk of the Week," in which staffers would find a well-lubricated patron in a Madison bar on Friday night and take their picture with a plaque to "celebrate" the achievement.
"We didn't have design guidelines—we didn't have a consistent headline font or anything," Dikkers recalls. "It didn't look like a newspaper. It looked like a wacky college humor publication."
But Dikkers hoped to turn The Onion into more than just a college paper. In 1995, he spearheaded a complete creative overhaul: Gone was the chaotically shifting style, replaced by a consistent aesthetic that resembled a real newspaper. The covers would print in color, mimicking full-color, image-heavy broadsheets like USA Today, and the articles would employ a dry, newsy writing style akin to the Associated Press.
The new tone would become another Onion signature. "A part of the humor is in the tension between what is being said and how it's being said," then–Managing Editor Robert Siegel, who developed the new writing style, told the Los Angeles Times in 1999. "If you take something you wouldn't normally read in a newspaper, and write it in that hack, deadpan AP style without ever winking, there's a comedic tension, a juxtaposition at work that makes it funny."
Owing to this dry delivery, articles were sometimes mistaken for fact—perhaps the greatest compliment a satirist can receive. In May 2002, The Onion published "Congress Threatens To Leave D.C. Unless New Capitol Is Built," lampooning professional sports teams that threaten to relocate unless taxpayers build them a new stadium; the story included a cartoon diagram of a new Capitol building with a retractable stadium roof. Days later, the Beijing Evening News translated and reposted the story as fact, even using the same image. In 2011, The Onion published "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex," about a fictitious Kansas facility that "will allow the organization to terminate unborn lives with an efficiency never before thought possible." Then-Rep. John Fleming (R–La.) shared the article on Facebook, bemoaning "abortion by the wholesale."
The professionalized Onion proved successful, with wide national appeal. While the paper remained free, it opened distribution offices in major cities across North America. It also sent copies and free subscriptions to Hollywood talent agencies; Dikkers reports that one recipient, the comedy musician "Weird Al" Yankovic, "really liked it and he told all his friends," providing some early cultural cachet.
The American newspaper industry was also booming. In 1997, just two years after The Onion took a swipe at USA Today by aping its layout, USA Today's parent company Gannett enjoyed a 26.6 percent pretax profit margin; as a whole, publicly traded newspaper companies averaged nearly 20 percent margins that year, while U.S. manufacturing averaged 7.6 percent margins.
In those days, newspapers had long been considered a safe investment. After World War II, with the advent of television, many smaller local newspapers closed or merged with a competing paper, but the publications that survived typically thrived, with annual profit margins between 20 percent and 40 percent. Papers had subscribers, but income was mostly driven by advertising; at the peak in 2005, newspaper ads netted $49 billion, making up 82 percent of papers' total revenue.
Modern readers may find it hard to believe, but at the time, newspapers were a cash cow. The early days of the internet only supercharged the trend.
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In 1996, with a weekly print circulation of 100,000, The Onion went online—mostly to defend its intellectual property. Even with the mass internet in its infancy, Onion articles went viral as early web users shared funny headlines across email chains and Usenet forums, without attribution. (One particularly popular example, written amid war in the Yugoslav region: "Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia: Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny To Be First Recipients.")
The Onion was a natural fit for the internet "just by the nature of a news story's inverted-pyramid structure," Wired's Mike Tanner wrote in 1997. "Surfers can enjoy the site as a list of unlikely headlines, get the kernel of the joke in a story's lead, or read as deeply into a piece as they have an inclination for." The Onion was creating content perfect for social media, a decade before Facebook or Twitter went live.
Take, for example, the November 2008 Onion article, "26-Year-Old To See Every Asshole He Ever Went To High School With On Night Before Thanksgiving." The headline on its own is funny and relatable, but reading on yields further gems: "For the fifth straight year," the article begins, employing a "NEW YORK" dateline for a further air of authenticity, "Jordan McCabe will return home for the holidays and spend the night before Thanksgiving running into every smug and unlikable asshole he ever went to high school with, the 26-year-old reported Monday." Readers who stay to the end are rewarded with a delightful capper: "Several Marshall High School alumni have expressed similar misgivings about running into former classmates on the night before Thanksgiving. 'I can't believe McCabe is coming back,' said local resident Ricky Cook. 'That guy's such a fuckin' asshole.'"
The Onion thrived online. By 2001, five years after the website launched, it logged more than 750,000 unique monthly visitors. Meanwhile, print circulation doubled.
That same year, The Onion moved from Madison to Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, in what The New York Times called "part of a plan to expand from simply a humor newspaper into a full production company." It moved again in 2005, to what the Times called "an airy new space in SoHo." New offices brought new studio space, enabling expansion into both audio and video. The paper started Onion Radio News, a minutelong daily radio segment that topped download charts the week it premiered on podcast platforms.
In 2007, just months after Google acquired YouTube and with streaming video in its infancy, the paper launched the Onion News Network site, featuring short videos spoofing cable news. Within 18 months, it received more than 5 million monthly video views. At the beginning of 2011, two Onion-helmed shows premiered on cable TV: a half-hour Onion News Network on IFC, and the SportsCenter parody Onion SportsDome on Comedy Central.
It was a banner time for digital media. Vice had started in 1994 as a free Montreal punk magazine; by the end of 2009, it was a burgeoning Brooklyn media empire. Amid nine-figure investments from such companies as Disney and News Corp, Vice Media would continue to expand, launching a news division and a cable network, and winning multiple Emmy and Peabody Awards for its TV documentaries. It also significantly grew its real estate footprint, in the process displacing several beloved Brooklyn music venues by taking over their building (and in the process netting an estimated $6.5 million in state incentives).
The gossip site Gawker operated out of its owner's Manhattan loft before moving to a SoHo walk-up in 2008, then a three-floor office space on Fifth Avenue in 2014—all on the basis of ad revenue, driven by tens of millions of monthly page views across both its flagship site and numerous spinoffs. BuzzFeed launched in 2006 as a dedicated aggregator of viral trends before later expanding its remit with BuzzFeed News, a full-fledged newsroom that won a Pulitzer and was a finalist for three others. In 2014, Vice Media reported annual advertising revenues of $175 million, while Pew Research estimated BuzzFeed's at $60 million and Gawker Media's at $15 million to $20 million. That same year, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz valued BuzzFeed at $850 million.
There seemed to be no better time to be a digital media outlet. But as they would soon find out, success can't last forever.
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In September 2011, after a decade in New York, The Onion announced its newsroom would move once again, this time to Chicago. Then-COO Mike McAvoy told The Atlantic this was a cost-saving measure: The corporate office was already located there, and besides, Illinois offered a film production tax incentive that would apply to web videos. But Onion features editor Joe Garden told The Huffington Post the staff was "a little bit blindsided" by the news. Of the paper's 16 full-time writers and editors, only five made the move. During the relocation process, after just a year on the air, IFC canceled Onion News Network. Comedy Central had canceled Onion SportsDome the previous year after airing only 10 episodes.
In Chicago, The Onion refocused its efforts as a digital-first publication. "Everything about the Onion is bigger and faster than it was a year ago" and it "publishes twice as much content," wrote Slate's Farhad Manjoo. At the same time, Manjoo noted that—like Stewart's The Daily Show—the paper was becoming "a little scoldy, oversmart, and lacking much nuance. In an attempt to make a viral joke, the new Onion often makes an easy one."
In 2013, The Onion solidified its digital-first status by ending its free printed paper. The distribution network had already shrunk to just three major cities, from nearly two dozen at its height. ("Sources close to print, the method of applying ink to paper in order to convey information to a mass audience, have confirmed that the declining medium passed away early Thursday morning," the paper "reported" earlier that year. "The influential means of communication was 1,803.")
Discontinuing the print edition "will make little difference to the bottom line," Lynne Marek of Crain's Chicago Business wrote at the time: The publication was increasingly focused on "content production, including video, for the Web," including partnerships with established brands to develop advertising campaigns. But this proved short-lived: In October 2015, amid layoffs, The Onion announced it was seeking a buyer. "We have less demand" for advertising and branded content, Onion COO Kurt Mueller noted in a staff memo. "There's demand, but we just overestimated what the demand is."
It was a tough time for many digital media companies. In 2023, just six years after achieving a $5.7 billion valuation, Vice Media filed for bankruptcy; it would ultimately accept a buyout from its creditors for $350 million. "Vice had a pitch—we know how to engage young people—but they never found a way to turn that pitch into a business," one media analyst told Press Gazette. BuzzFeed also shuttered its news division in 2023, just two years after winning its Pulitzer; the company had lost 90 percent of its value since going public two years earlier.
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The Onion then entered a period faced by many news outlets: acquisition. The Spanish-language broadcaster Univision purchased a controlling stake in January 2016; that same year, it snapped up all of Gawker Media's non-Gawker properties in a fire sale, when a nine-figure invasion-of-privacy judgment forced the gossipmonger into bankruptcy. Univision later bundled these holdings into a new media company, which a private equity firm purchased in 2019 and named G/O Media.
Over the next four years, G/O Media shuttered two sites and offloaded several others. Two Onion spinoffs, The A.V. Club and ClickHole, were sold to the publication Paste and the makers of the game Cards Against Humanity, respectively. In January 2024, Digiday reported that G/O Media was looking to sell all its remaining assets—with a particular emphasis on The Onion.
This, too, is a trend affecting corporate media, as large companies gobble up smaller outlets. In the 1980s, many large corporations with no obvious journalistic purview had bought up major media outlets while newspaper conglomerates acquired dozens of smaller local papers. The difference today is profitability. Gone are the days when Gannett could pay $305 million to acquire two Louisville newspapers, secure in the knowledge that the papers had previously averaged 12.6 percent profit margins. Now, digital outlets struggle and legacy newspapers wither. Where Gannett once enjoyed healthy double-digit operating margins, it recorded a $6 million operating loss in the third quarter of 2024. A 2022 report by Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism noted that since 2015, more than a fourth of America's newspapers had closed—and by 2025, that figure was on track to be a third.
The 21st century brought private equity firms into the mix, acquiring struggling news outlets and trying to turn them around to be sold for a profit. A 2023 paper from New York University's Stern School of Business found that "private equity ownership is associated with a lower chance of newspaper closure"; at the same time, the authors found that a local newspaper's acquisition by private equity led to declines in "civic engagement and political participation," "news content about local government," "the absolute amount of local news," and "employment of editors and reporters."
But for The Onion, things suddenly started to look up: The paper was sold again in April 2024 to what G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller called "four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy-based content."
The new owners brought back the print edition, though it was now offered by mail to subscribers rather than distributed for free. Executive Editor Jordan LaFlure told The New York Times that he hoped the print edition could appeal to younger readers the same way vinyl records have a niche in an age of streaming music. The Onion took a shot at the Gray Lady in its redebut issue with the article, "'New York Times' To Cease Publication." ("With the struggling newspaper admitting this was the final nail in its coffin, The New York Times announced this week that it would permanently cease publication, saying there was no way it could compete with The Onion's newly relaunched print edition.")
Ben Collins, The Onion's new CEO, says many internet media companies in the 2010s "came into a lot of cash very quickly and just kind of threw it at the wall." He says the new leadership hopes to abandon many of the industry's bad habits, like catering to Facebook algorithms or chasing clicks at the expense of content. He likens The Onion under private equity ownership to a dog in an animal shelter, saying "the dog was done being in the fucking crate."
"The vast majority of their income was from programmatic advertising from those weird chumboxes," Collins says, referring to ads that serve up spam and clickbait. He says the "staff mandate" prior to the acquisition was to prioritize "jokes in slideshows," which require readers to click through multiple pages per article and thereby see multiple ads.
The new guard kept the entire staff and reinvested in projects that had been left to languish, such as video production. They also made more audacious moves: In late 2024, the paper won the rights to conspiracy-monger Alex Jones' Infowars, including all its holdings and trademarks, at a bankruptcy auction. They intend to relaunch Infowars as a parody of conspiracists, though courts have since stalled the sale.
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For now, the shift seems to be working. People are subscribing to the newspaper, and Collins says the video team is "self-sufficient" from YouTube monetization. On Election Day 2024, he notes, The Onion had "the number one trending video on YouTube…above Beyoncé." The video: an Onion News Network sketch in which an election analyst assesses the state of the race by using a giant cable news–style touchscreen to scrutinize a single Pennsylvania swing voter, drilling down to assess his voting patterns on a cellular level—before finally zooming all the way out "to the edges of our cosmos, where we see ultimately how meaningless this whole race really is, and how insignificant all of our tiny little lives really are."
Could The Onion's newfound success offer any advice for other news outlets and media companies struggling to adapt to the digital world?
"We're obviously an edge case here because we're a stupid fake news website, and that's great," Collins advises. "But don't be afraid of your own shadow….If you're a newspaper that's withstood 150, 200 years of this stuff…it's an amazing feat. Lean into that and lean into the people you've already hired and the people that you're trying to talk to."
Collins advocates a model in which readers and content providers engage more directly with one another. "You're not going to be a mega company monolith," he says. "You're not going to be like MGM in the 1940s, but you're going to be able to make the thing that you want to make. That's what I would say to everybody else, is just, don't you like the product that you work on all day long? Show off that stuff. Be as in love with it as people are with consuming it."
The post Are the News Media in Their <i>Onion</i> Era? appeared first on Reason.com.
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