Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
Thu, 22 Aug 2024
The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024. Links: The Onion sold by G/O Media | The New York Times Sam Reich on revamping the game show - and Dropout’s success | NPR Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder Craig Silverman: Digital advertising’s structure has been weaponized | Digiday US Warns a Gaza Ceasefire Would Only Benefit Humanity | The Onion The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free | Current Affairs A newsroom expands and The Onion is out again on paper | Washington Post Report: Nuclear War Sounds Fucking Amazing Right Now | The Onion Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge Jury awards nearly $1B to Sandy Hook families in Alex Jones defamation case | CNN ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens | The Onion Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23989633 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Ben Collins and Danielle Strulé, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion. This episode's kind of a wild ride. The Onion is a comedy institution.
It launched in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin as a parody newspaper, and over the years, it's become hugely influential. You'll hear Ben describe The Onion's role as writing the dumbest possible sentence about what's going on on a day-to-day basis. a task which means The Onion often publishes the sharpest headlines in media, even if The Onion itself is literally fake news.
But like everything else in media, The Onion went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. It was acquired by Univision in 2016, which didn't really know what to do with it, so it was merged into the Gizmodo Media Group, which is what the remnants of Gawker were called after Hulk Hogan sued that company into bankruptcy.
Gizmodo Media in turn got sold to a private equity firm and rebranded as Geo Media in 2019. The O presumably stood for The Onion. We could do an entire episode on the calamity of GeoMedia, but the short version is that it spent the last five years systematically selling everything off.
That's how Ben and Danielle came to be in charge of The Onion, alongside CMO Lila Brilson and Scott Kidder, the part-time CFO. Before this, Ben was an award-winning disinformation reporter at NBC News. and he made an offhand joke on Blue Sky about buying The Onion.
You'll hear him describe how that led to a series of meetings and plans, and ultimately, to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson bankrolling the deal. I love stories like this, and I really wanted to know how that actually came together, how Ben and Danielle see The Onion working now, and what the business model is going to be.
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