Danielle Strulé
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We kicked the tires on a lot of stuff. We talked to a number of really great agencies. Honestly, it was really like a fun sales process to be the client representing the onion in a bidding process between design and dev shops wanting to work on this project. Yeah. Everyone has been so great. I would have hired them all if I had four onions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
But yeah, we worked with a company called MG Strategy and Design. They're distributed and have a lot of deep experience in newsrooms, both in paper and digitally. So we have been excited to work with them on both getting the website up and getting the DNC paper designed. And templates for our new papers moving forward. And they're like just such a dream team.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
They have something like 200 collective years experience in newspapers and digital newspapers. We moved on to WordPress. We looked at other platforms, of course. But yeah, moving fast. Here we are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Ask him what he's going to do to keep Tumblr in its glorious state. I ask him that once a year.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
If you look at the pie chart of revenue sources, we don't want any one piece of the pie to be so massive. And I think that we'll have a number of revenue streams that all work together to support the wider web of the Onion universe.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We don't want to put a paywall in front of The Onion. That was a really wonderful and crucial alignment that we had with Jeff from the get-go. The Onion should remain free for everyone on the planet on its website. We want these headlines, these jokes, this often very real take on the news to travel far and wide. So, yeah, no paywalls.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We have ideas about apps and other ways that our members can come together in digital space and in physical space. But because of Ben's insane rush to get us out for the DNC, we're baby stepping here. We're using a platform called News Revenue Hub to help us manage paywalls. member contributions.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We had an incredible party the other day here in Chicago in advance of the DNC, a celebration of print. It was so fun to get people together in real life. In my wild Friday nights at home, just going through the spreadsheet of who these subscribers are and Googling around like, okay, who is here in Chicago? And like, who are these people? What a fun bunch they are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah, we're really excited about getting our members together in new ways. But for now, no paywalls. We'll mail you the paper.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yes, we have classic Google ads. We have a meeting today, actually. This afternoon about ad mapping for more like premium custom units. Another shout out to a great partner, Hashtag Labs. The living legend, John Shankman, and his team have been helping us implement a new ad stack and be ready for the kind of like big custom directly sold ad stuff. But...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Unfortunately, it is a programmatic world across the internet. So make sure you like those shoes you're shopping for because some of them you're still going to see. But that ad load now is so much smaller than it was, you know, it's so much smaller than it was on Kindra.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
If I had a time machine to go back and talk some sense into that guy who traded like physical paper dollars for digital pennies on pricing internet ads in the first place, I would do it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
How does it look like? At one point, The Onion was 200 people and had multiple publications. Our office is comically large relative to the size of our current staff. It's a pretty flat structure. Myself as running product, Alila running marketing, Ben as CEO. We've got Scott Kidder as CFO. We split time with him. He's fractional, I mean.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And everybody else, like they were already a well-oiled machine. So nothing has really changed on the editorial side.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It was something that we talked to with executive editor and two of the union shop stewards in our very first dinner out. The slideshow grind was a big pain point for them, and that was table stakes for everyone. Yeah. But it was, I mean, when we announced it to the staff, there were happy tears. The end of slideshows were mentioned to like cheers of joy.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And it had been such a process for us to get through the transaction with Jeff and with Gio. For reasons I don't even remember, like I think we were supposed to announce to the staff on a Monday and it ended up taking until Thursday to get it all done. But, you know, the following Monday we came back in the office and they're just like back on their regular grind. They meet in the writer's room.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
They go through headlines and jokes contributed from the contributors network. I think no one at The Onion when we took it over had worked there for less than four years.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah, tops. Around there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Oh, yeah. Ben left out the part where he's always saying, and we got to do it faster.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We did a little offsite with new executive team, Jeff, and the top of the editorial side of the business. We really did go through like, all right, what are our priorities and how do we want to tackle the next six months? And our goal is to keep the readers at the core of everything that we do and deliver the best user experience that we possibly can.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
even at the expense of revenue where necessary. That bit was added by Jeff. And, you know, we can refer back to that document about making the onion that we're proud of, execute against that and make room for more jokes. And I think we're going to continue to win. It's my hope.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Well, the audience in Chicago – Funnily enough, there's a lot of printing presses in the Midwest because, you know, it's a central point for shipping.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I mean, there are more third party logistics type printers that we looked at. We ended up with the fine folks at TopWeb. They do have a division that does print on demand for runs as small as 100 papers at a time. They do a lot of like... bachelorette parties with that printing press. But the printing press that we run on is massive.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We actually went, gosh, I can't believe that that was less than a freaking week ago to see the big run of 40,000 come off for the DNC. It's just spectacular. This press that we are working with, they're called Top Web. They're known for like printing a lot of like multilingual newspapers that go all around.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I thought for sure that we were going to need to get them the paper like, I don't know, like a week in advance. That's what I was initially building all of our calendars against. But two-day turnaround time. But it was, I don't know, not as hard as I thought it was going to be.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We did have to get new InDesign license. Our executive editor, Jordan, he came over one day and he's like, I need an InDesign license stat. That's great.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Dog, I regret to inform you, I got to deal with this later. It's probably tomorrow's problem, actually, but we need to print more for signups. Amazing. That's great. Yeah, I feel very lucky that our friends at TopWeb have a fast turnaround time. But yeah, we need to print more for signups. We, you know, it's the DNC. Everybody's here in Chicago.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We've had street teams going around like our staff has been dropping them off in everyone's favorite breweries, coffee shops, bookstores, what have you.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Everyone remembers their first time. Mine was also in Madison, Wisconsin. So we've actually gotten a number of inquiries from people in our membership who are like, hey, you know, like I have a. a coffee shop or I have a vintage store and I would love to, I don't know, is there some kind of membership that would allow me to put a stack of them out in my business?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And I think that we do want to find a way to make that happen because it's not that the print product should be some exclusive thing that you can never get your hands on. We want more of these papers out in the hands of the people. I know that there's a meeting happening this week in the He wants to take out all of the newspaper boxes on the street and people are kind of freaking out.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
In the best way. In the best way.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
But we've had a number of nationwide businesses even say, you know, if you guys gave me a rack, like I would put this in the lobby, like let's talk. And we do want to be open to discussing that kind of thing. But first priority is getting the papers in the mail to our members. Second order priority, getting these jokes in front of as many people as possible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And if some of that involves like college ambassador program or like distributed distribution that happens from our special members and we sell the special subscription that gets you a bundle, like we are pumped about all of those opportunities.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Something that we've heard from the writer's room and editor-in-chief Chad is that The Onion approaches all of the news and all these headlines from a baseline of humanity. By keeping that baseline of humanity at the core of the humor, I think it allows them to cut right to the chase and say the right things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
And we called the Onion Union.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah. In the print edition, we ask her everything about, you know, is Joe Biden nice in real life? What are your views on the death penalty? Who will you be voting for this November? Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
You've got to get the answer in print if you want to see it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Still pinching ourselves, I think. It really is wild how much happened and how quickly it all came together. Since then, we've migrated off of the old Kinja CMS and made a new website and launched a newspaper and pivoted the business model to memberships. It is amazing how much we've gotten done.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Just truly so proud to be a part of a team that can help keep the lights on and hopefully blinking a little bit harder. And it's just a pleasure to be a part of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We definitely needed a plan. We worked closely with our incredible CFO, Scott Kidder, to model out how we would run the business based on information that we got from GEO about basically the P&L model. And intel that we got from the union about what was needed, we built out a deck, built out a spreadsheet. Scott is so good at spreadsheets.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
We came out to meet the union and get a sense for they like us, we like them, we love them. It was pretty quick after that, like the following week, Jeff came in hot and was like, yeah, I mean, like, let's meet up and talk about this. So we came back to Onion Global HQ, brought Jeff this time. Yeah, we were off to the races.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Yeah, he started as an intern and ended as COO, I think testified in the Hulk Hogan trial, and truly has always been a living legend of digital media in my mind, but also a friend. Just couldn't have asked for a better one. He also handled all of our DNS transfers because he was a childhood IT prodigy. Seriously, he had like an IT company from eighth grade.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Jeff has gone on the record saying that he wants to own the Onion for the rest of his life. He has also talked about how excited he is to make an investment for the long term and not have to worry about the quarterly reports from his lifestyle as Twilio CEO. I think, like, also Twilio is extremely cool, incredibly powerful, crucial, but...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
It is so much more fun to be the owner of The Onion, I'm sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I mean, he's he's incredibly patient. And Jeff really put him on the spot here. Jeff has enough money that he can be in this one for the love. But, you know, we're also not a charity. And he is very rigorous with us about what our model says, how we're meeting the model. And but it's more important to him how we meet the moment. Jeff, if you're out there, buddy, I hope to make you proud.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I think that they had to know that the Onion was a real crown jewel in the portfolio. And there's a lot of people at Jio who definitely wanted to find a great home for it. And I think that we all feel delighted that this is the end result.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Too quickly, Nealey. Too quickly. Ben made me do it this fast so that we could meet the timeline of the DNC being in Chicago. We wanted to roll out at this moment. I mean, the way that it works is you have a transition services agreement with the company that you're acquiring from. You know, we were allowed to stay on Kinja for... like four months.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
I'm sure that they would have extended it if we needed longer. But yeah, you know, we're in a Slack room with the geo people. There's so many little logistics to get sorted out on the way. But I think we're in a great spot that it's finally done. And we're five days into not Kinja anymore. And it's all happening.