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.
And really, what it's been like to grab a bunch of friends from a group chat and start a company together that now runs something as important as The Onion. On top of all that, The Onion just relaunched its print edition, and I really want to know how that even works in 2024. Where do you get something printed? How do you estimate how many copies to print?
And how do you do all that on top of migrating the entire Onion website to WordPress? There's a lot going on in this episode, but the one thing I want to call out is just how much fun Ben and Danielle seem to be having. That's a rare quality in media right now, and it's infectious. In fact, I'll just come out and say it, because I think you're going to hear it in the episode.
I'm rooting for them to succeed. I have all the same memories of reading The Onion as anyone else, and I hope they figure it out. Okay, The Onion's Ben Collins and Danielle Strelay. Here we go. Ben Collins, you are the new CEO of The Onion. Danielle Sterlet, you are the new Chief Product Officer. Welcome to Decoder. Pleasure to be here. We're really excited. I am very excited to talk to you.
Danielle, you just told me this is your first podcast ever, so this is going to be real fun. I'm excited. All right, let's start with this. You are the new executives of The Onion. It was previously owned by... A thing called GeoMedia. I'm not even going to try to explain the genesis or the name of GeoMedia. But now you have a new company called Global Tetrahedron that owns the onion.
Explain how we got here.
Back in January, I was reading Adweek. I was writing a very – I don't know if the book was bad, but the process of writing the book was miserable. It was writing about Nazis on the internet and stuff. You know those people.
Yeah.
I'm sick of those people, terrible. So I was reading Adweek and I saw that The Onion was for sale. And this was around the time where things were just shuttering. Sports Illustrated and Jezebel just shuttered. And I was from the same company, Gio owned Jezebel. Or things were being turned into like AI slop farms or Elon Musk was buying it, worst case scenario. I had posted on Blue Sky.
I said, the onion's for sale. You know, who wants to help me buy this thing? I have $600. Lila Brilson, who's in Chicago, where the onion is based, emailed me and she was like, but seriously, how do we do this? Like, it's an institution. We can't let this thing die. It's like important to keep this thing alive. And I was like, let me just make some phone calls.
So the first person I called was Danielle. She ran product Tumblr. when that turned all of our children weird in America.
In the best way. In the best way.
In the best way. Oh, not like J.D. Vance weird. Like, you know, David Bowie weird.
We're all goth furries now because of Tom.
Yeah, exactly. And I was like, I think this is a special thing that we can go and go out and get. So we spent the next few weeks just calling everybody we knew. And we're like, does this guy know a rich guy? Like, you know, how do we do this exactly? How does this actually take place?
And we called the Onion Union.
Yeah. Daniel can talk about this. The very first people we called at all was the Onion Union because we had heard there was this whisper network that the union was this onerous and scary thing and all this stuff. And all they were really asking for, they were in negotiations, was to make sure that any content that was AI was labeled as such. That was really their big ask.
And we're like, that's not onerous. That's regular. That's like a good idea. Yeah. So then we kept pounding on the door and we realized like this might be like a very good opportunity to save this like very beautiful American thing. A couple of weeks later, we got put in touch with Jeff Lawson, the guy who created Twilio. He had some time on his hands recently, and he also really loved the onion.
Always wanted to buy it, but didn't really know what to do with it and how to do it. And we're like, we have some pretty good plans for it if we want to talk about it. Within two and a half months, basically, from me posting on Blue Sky and calling Danielle, we were in charge of the onion. So kind of a wild ride.
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.
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.
Yeah, so let me ask you some just questions. I always joke on the show that I watch a lot of music documentaries, and the first act is the band in a garage, and then immediately they're playing the arena, like... No one ever sees that middle part. Everyone takes it for granted. And you are firmly in the middle part, right? You are a great misinformation reporter at NBC News.
And now you're the CEO of The Onion. And I feel like everybody wants that possibility to be true. Like, well, I should just buy it and fix it. And you accomplished at least the first part of it, which is you have purchased it. But just tell me about that process. A little bit more because I still think these ideas can be hard to execute. No one really knows what happens. You call Danielle.
You're in the moment now. Did you have to – when you presented to Jeff, who's the money, did you need a business plan? When you went to G.O. and said, we'd like to buy this, were they like, we want a bigger number? Talk about those parts because that's, I think, the part that nobody really gets to do.
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.
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.
Yeah. And in terms of the business model, by the way, I just want to bring up Scott was the COO, right? Daniel of Gawker?
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.
In terms of standing up a brand new company, which is what we had to do, having Danielle and Jeff and Scott around was kind of a miracle. But, you know, going into it, this did not just come out of thin air. We had all worked at these big, gigantic places and were like, you know, if we ran this place, what would it actually look like? We wouldn't be doing this stuff or whatever, right?
I think everybody has that thought process. And we went into it being like, okay, so what would we actually do then? Like, what is working in our spaces? So a big model that we had in our heads was Dropout. They used to be called College Humor. They were owned by IAC. And IAC, Barry Diller just like gave up on them a few years ago, right before the pandemic started. And
One of their employees at the time, this guy, Sam Reich, Reich, sorry, Reich, Reich, Reich, Reich. He's going to get so angry that I mispronounced his name. He's the son of Robert Reich, like the former labor secretary. Not a joke. He was like, you know, what if we just leaned into what we're good at, basically? And they they stood up a new subscription service for what they're good at.
And they have a bunch of shows that are really good. They're like game shows and all these other things. And they're like six bucks a month. Our, you know, people are developing parasocial relationships with our talent. They'll give us that.
And I think, you know, in a couple of years, they just leaned all the way into it, leaned all the way into, you know, big social moments that they do on like YouTube shorts and Instagram and stuff. Yeah. And now one of their shows has sold out two nights in a row at Madison Square Garden. They have like a million subs.
And they've just leaned into the stuff that they like to do and their audience likes. Their audience has paid up for it and they're happy. They like to give them money because that's what it's about, right? That's what it was about before people got in their own heads about it.
content on the internet in the last 10, 15 years, trying to play this like big arbitrage game and like basically gambling with content and stuff. And we can do that. Like, it's not just them, you know, it's Defector and Aftermath and 404 and these places that were progenitors to this model. Like we can do this stuff first.
We can lean heavily on our subscribers and like try to make them really happy and give them something in the mail. Yeah. But we can do this other stuff too. We can make video. We can sell ads the old-fashioned way. That's what we decided to do is like stand up a company that's based on people genuinely liking our content and not like tricking people into clicking stuff all the time.
And that's where we're at.
There's an idea here that you have, which Defector for media – my friend Casey at Platformer, right? These ideas that you're going to start smaller media companies. That only works if your investors are okay with ultimately running a small private media company. And maybe you don't have investors. Some of those organizations don't have any investors.
Maybe you have investors who do think, okay, I'm just going to effectively donate some money to this outfit to stand it up, get it running, and then I'll be happy that this thing exists. What's your relationship with Jeff, your big investor, who is a Silicon Valley tech CEO? Is he expecting big returns? Do you have other investors who are expecting big returns?
Or are we just trying to preserve the onion?
You know, we've already made $500 billion.
This is the real danger of interviewing people from the onion, I would point out.
We came into it and part of the whole dance here with him was figuring each other out and being like, are you really serious about this? Which is like preserving this thing that we really love from our childhood, you know, or preserving this way of speaking about the world and thinking about the world. We both realized like, yeah, we're both really serious about this thing.
We really want this thing to live and be a good, sustainable business that can churn out America's best comedy writers. That's what it's done for 30 plus years. And we're now at this place where we do trust each other. That's what this is about. And it's working. And it's good. By the way, it's good.
Like it's having a good, sustainable business that makes money and is not tied to like is not trying to get like an exit with like the Saudi Arabian wealth fund. Like that's nice. It's a nice life. That is a way of running a business. And that's what we're going to try to do.
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...
It is so much more fun to be the owner of The Onion, I'm sure.
There's a thing with tech CEOs and billionaires. They have their thing. And then, you know, Mark Benioff needs to own Time magazine so he can go to the parties. And Jeff Bezos needs to own The Washington Post so he can go to the parties. And Lauren Powell Jobs needs to own The Atlantic so she can go to the parties. Because their enterprise software companies are not cool.
No offense to those people, but it's much more fun. The conversations you're having as the owner of The Onion is a lot more fun than the owner of National Geographic or whatever. Like, I don't know. So, like, I understand it from his side. And, like, there's a nice benefit that it's, like, a pretty good business.
But he's not expecting 10x returns in your first year or anything like that.
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.
That's good. Everyone should have directly addressed their billionaire. I think that's important. That should become part of the decoder rubric.
I hope to embarrass him with some ridiculous headline that I have to stand up for that I have nothing to do with. That's my goal.
Don't worry. We're going to come to that. So you buy the company. You're in the mix. What did Gio have to say? Were they just fine? Like, please take this off our hands?
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.
You know, the Onion was rolled up into Jio. You mentioned they had to get them off Kinjo, which is their software. They were also selling it. I'm sure they had their ad stack. You very notably took Taboola off the pages. How quickly, once you bought it, were you able to say, OK, we're moving, we're taking all of this archive and content and taking it somewhere else?
Because that is the big, tricky, hard decision.
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.
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.
I looked at the site just now. It's like, oh, man, that doesn't look like a Kindle website anymore. Did you have to hire designers and engineers? How did you pick a platform?
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.
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.
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.
It's a WordPress world. The Verge is moving to WordPress. Everyone's going to end up moving to WordPress. They're going to be a monopoly. And I'm going to have Matt back on the show and be like, what are you going to do with all of your untold riches and power?
Ask him what he's going to do to keep Tumblr in its glorious state. I ask him that once a year.
And he just sighs at me. We'll get there. Ben, you were a reporter. Now you're the CEO, right? So you have to deal with your new unionized, I guess you could call it a newsroom. I don't know what you call that. We call it a writer's room, but yeah. The unionized writer's room. You've got Danielle out here doing... bidding out contracts to migrate to WordPress with a design shop.
You decided to launch a print newspaper. How are you organizing all that as a CEO in your head? Is this all new to you? Were you excited about these challenges?
Yeah, I was extremely excited, especially with these guys. A lot of what we deal with is people who just bend over backwards to help the onion. Like the MG people, they just wanted to help the onion. It is a special place in people's hearts. And just in the same way that we jumped in trying to save this thing, everybody else does.
Everybody else has their favorite onion headline in their heads, so they really wanted to do it. So there are definitely some skills and stuff that I had to pick up and learn along the way. My reporting was always tech adjacent, so I knew the verbiage. But it's service level always, right? So I know enough to not be completely humiliated 85% of the time.
And thankfully, Danielle and Leela fill in those gaps really well. But at the end of the day, the thing that we know how to do that this place knows how to do is sort of drive the conversation and, you know, say the dumbest possible sentence about what's going on on a day to day basis. At the end of the day, if we can't turn that into a business, what are we doing?
That's a very it's a very fun life. That's what I did over the last few months. I knew that we needed a new website. Danielle knew it more than anybody else. And we did that immediately. And then the more that we heard from people, we were just really receptive and open to feedback about what people expected from The Onion, right? What do people really want?
What?
How is this possible? I was proud to be an American or something. I was just like, oh, how is this happening? And I wanted to bring back that feeling. The staff was so excited about it. They had been living in this content farm hell for the last few years where they were literally trying to get people to click through on a slideshow to refresh programmatic advertising.
And you can run a business like that, but it drives you insane. And the economics of that were also deteriorating. So we were like, what is going to make the staff happy? What's going to make the people on the other end of this happy? People, you know, helping us run a business from the consumer side happy. And what do we want to do? And the paper was the obvious thing.
So then we just had to like fill in the gaps about how do we do this? How do we get a website that can sell this thing and also make it so people actually want to click on our stories?
What's going to be more lucrative in the long run? Is it the paper or the website?
What we said at the beginning is that we need to relay the foundation here, right? And the foundation is the paper. And this site on a day-to-day basis, but if we can have a paper that basically pays for the writer's room and then do all this extra weird stuff on top, then this is a really good business.
Like over the years, they were best when they were nimble because they had the foundation, right? They made ClickHole because the site was doing OK because of Univision and all this stuff. They made O and N because they got an influx from YouTube money. But the site was doing okay at the time. It was doing all right. So now, like, how do we lay that foundation again?
The foundation will now be the paper. And then on top of that, we can take big risks to do weird stuff. That's the way we look at it, basically.
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.
We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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We're back with the Onions, Ben Collins, and Danielle Strulé to dig deeper into how the satire website is changing up how it plans to make money. That actually brings me back to taking out Taboola. Taboola is the chum box in the bottom of every webpage on the internet. And it's basically free money for a lot of publishers.
And you immediately turned off the free money because it destroys your user experience. I mean, it is a deal with the devil. When you're thinking about, okay, we're going to have multiple revenue sources, are you thinking about any advertising on the site itself? Are you thinking about other ways to monetize the website?
Or is it you subscribe and you get access to the website as well as a newspaper?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, we're really excited about getting our members together in new ways. But for now, no paywalls. We'll mail you the paper.
So are you monetizing the website at all? Are you doing advertising the website right now?
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...
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.
I guess this is part of my question and I think, Ben, you covered this very directly. Daniel, it sounds like you lived this very directly. This world, especially programmatic world, the reason all these media companies just sold their soul for scale on other people's distribution is because programmatic advertising pays pennies, right? And so you just need to collect as many pennies as you can.
And every other concern of this scale kind of runs into that problem of we want to sell direct ads more premium. We want to make something more beautiful. And the advertisers say, well, can you get me 20 million people to look at this picture of a shoe? And then things kind of just come to a close. Are you set up for those problems? Do you have ideas there?
Are you just not worried about it because the core product is the subscription? What's the dynamic in your head?
It's several things. And, you know, if you're trying to get 20 million people to look at a picture of a shoe there, that's not 20 million people. You know, it's maybe half that at best.
And there's 10 million crypto bots at least.
Exactly. Right. And, you know, I'm a lot of this is driven by good reporting. Craig Silverman back from the BuzzFeed days, networks of ProPublica. It's a lot of it is a racket, man. Like it's not real. If it isn't a house of cards that says more about us in the economy than I want to think about. So I do want to get out ahead of it because it was most of our balance sheet.
We don't want to be a part of that economy if we if we don't have to. That's it. Like, you know, when we got the company, we got the P&L and we got the contracts and all this stuff. You do look at it's extremely seductive, right? You see like, oh, wow, like you really can just make money letting it roll in. That is a way of doing business. It's just not the way I want things to work.
Maybe this is like a very like hopium millennial bullshit thing. But like I want people to like us, therefore pay us money to give us the thing. I want this to be a simpler business. I think there's like – you know, there are two economies near it. One is like a real economy where you can pay someone for goods and services that you like. And then there's this other one that is fictional.
They were living in the second one and – It also also crushes your soul to try to feed that beast. It was doing that to our writers. Yeah. And, you know, the weight has lifted off of them recently. And we want to we have some sort of responsibility to the world to turn out good comedy writers. It can't just be getting them to tell people to make the 14th page of a slideshow.
It has to be them actually attacking the world in the way they do it.
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.
I think we all would. But that's – it's interesting because the push back then was that you shouldn't have a paywall. You should never gate any information. And not trading the analog dollars to digital pennies was some sort of moral – capitulation. That moment I think we all look back on, but it feels like the pendulum has swung.
I'm actually curious if what you're seeing in your subscriber list when you look at it or you see who you're converting into paying is people who have the same regret from that moment in time or whether it's new younger people who would like different experiences. Because you might be the same result, but it's two very different audiences.
We're four days into reading cross tabs on this, so I wish we had better answers. But, like, it's both. And definitely the response that we've gotten is all across the map, right? As a previous disinformation reporter, I used to say this, you know, the lies are free and the good information is behind the paywall. And that's part of the fascist economy of information where –
The one of the things that becomes a commodity that is hidden behind paywalls, just like the water wars in the future is information. You have to pay to read Puck or Casey's newsletter or whatever stuff, stuff with good stuff in it. And Pizzagate is free. I was always worried about that.
But there is sort of a hybrid model here where you can pay people because you like them and you're paying for the ability to make this stuff free for future generations. And you still get a nice, like, you get a good thing in your hands. For us, it's a newspaper in the mail. Like, the margins are pretty good. And you can show a sign of support. You can develop a relationship with us.
But you can also, you're doing a service by keeping this thing free in the future. And that's really what we want to do is like so far, a lot of people have come out to do that in terms of like who is actually paying for it. You know, we're seeing people who are saying I'm 20 years old or something like a couple of people said this. And my grandmother had a stack of these in the basement.
That's how I even know what this is. And I'm paying for this. And I got a gift gift subscription for my grandmother. Right. It's a cross generational thing. Everybody's version of the onion. This is a really specific thing for us is very different. Everybody's favorite headline of the onion is usually something I've never fucking heard of in my life.
It's from 15 years ago and it's some like narrow joke about like Arby's or something. I have no idea. But the beauty of the place is that it adapts the times and everybody has their own sentimental relationship with it. So far, we've seen that, you know, in the in the bare bones crosstab reading we've read, you know, it's literally every single generation. We get a lot of Gen X men.
We get a lot of Gen Z women who liked our Palestine coverage. Like it's all over the place.
I want to come back to actually the thing you said about the dumbest sentence that sums up the day and then the idea of Palestine coverage in a comedy newspaper. But let me just wrap this line of questioning up with what I think of as the decoder questions. You took over a company. You made a new company. You've got a new C-suite. You've got a new investor.
Did you all just sit down and draw an org chart and say, well, this is good enough? How did that work? Pretty much.
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.
And everybody else, like they were already a well-oiled machine. So nothing has really changed on the editorial side.
Who was the person who got to say, please stop making slideshows?
All of us came to that conclusion, all of us.
Somebody had to say it. Was there like an all-hands meeting? How does it work to take over a well-oiled machine with a new group of executives?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, our editor-in-chief has been there for 27 years. Yeah.
Does that stack roll up to you as well, Ben?
The whole point of this from the very beginning is to protect their process. We didn't want to come in and change anything in that regard because the process is – It's a way of doing things that actually I think other places could really learn from and help from. I just want to walk through their daily process for writing headlines. They come in every day.
There's either one or two meetings depending on the day. And then they write. So usually it's around like 190 headlines. They are put into a Google form and completely anonymized. Then from there, it's trimmed down a little bit by one of the editors per day. Then they go in the room and they read them out loud, all of them.
And if it gets a laugh or if it's like that's something that's a character we're going to bring back or they're going to talk through it, they check it off. And then they whittle those down over and over and over again. By the end of the meeting, there's usually, what, Danielle, like 10 max, 5 to 10?
Yeah, tops. Around there.
And then those get written out. And if the copy's not good or if it's just a nib or something, that gets whittled down to like three or four per day. That comes from that contributor network that has like legit famous people in it or it comes from the people in the room. And then only after all that do they go back and they're like, that guy wrote that thing. Yeah. That's how meritocratic this is.
And if I came in there and I was like, oh, I have a better way of doing this, I would be a fucking maniac. So keeping that process in place was our number one goal, and we've not changed that in any capacity. Our whole thing, we just said to them, we just need to give you more avenues for jokes. We need to give you money for video. We need to, again, make a newspaper or something.
Whatever you guys want to do, you need to be in more... spaces to do that. So it's not just headlines in the internet, something much bigger. That's the thing that we're doing is we're protecting a process that can feed into much bigger things.
Yeah. All right. I got to ask you this question, Ben, because you're a new CEO. So I'm going to ask you personally, and then as a group, you and Daniel and everyone else, you have a lot of decisions to make. You decided to relaunch a print newspaper. You decided not to mess with the process. That is an important kind of decision. How do you make decisions?
Look, I try to get a feel for what everyone wants first. There is a level of selflessness, especially with this thing. I view this thing as a museum. Directly outside this door, there is 30 years of newspapers and boxes. And it would be a level of true egomania to think that I could do it better.
So the first thing we did was we brought in everybody that we could find from the 30 years of The Onion and talked to them. And we tried to listen to what they think The Onion is, and we tried to get every angle of it all the way around. And then we tried to listen to people, kids on TikTok who read our headlines and do the thing where they just point at it.
And we listened to those people too, right? What do they think The Onion is? People who've had this their whole lives. This is already an institution in their life, and they view it that way too. And then we just try to synthesize it. And we don't try to like stray from that too hard or don't try to make business decisions that interfere with that. We try to protect the sanctity of the thing.
And they're like, OK, well, how do we protect this and make it a business on top of it? And that's always been my thing for the last few months is make sure that they have what they need to succeed. And. That's really the whole process. I wish I should write it down and have a book that is an airport called Drive or something. Yeah. But I don't have that yet. I'll get back to you on that.
A core thesis of this show is that every executive at a fan company wants to have written a book like that, and this question is just bait for them. So welcome.
Oh, that's great.
You guys are a new executive team, right? You've all been friends, but you haven't made a lot of decisions together. There's a lot of weeds-y kinds of choices you have to make. How have you decided to make decisions together? Because friends working together, it can be kind of dicey.
Oh, my God. Yeah, of course. Danielle can talk about this, but we do have a call every single morning at 10 in the morning because she's in New York. Lila and I are in Chicago. So every day we try to ward off what I call what I say with Danielle, I call bureauitis, which is like.
I learned this from an old journalism professor, but like he was talking about how people – if you're like the London Bureau correspondent at the New York Times, you're king shit of fuck city in London, baby. You're walking around, coolest person in the world. Then you go back to New York and – You're like, hi, guys. Our number one priority is like everyone remembers that Danielle did this.
Like Danielle made this newspaper. Danielle made this website. So like a lot of that is there too. But yeah, I want to let Danielle talk about it because like, you know, friends becoming business partners is a crazy thing to do, especially when you're on this kind of timeline.
Oh, yeah. Ben left out the part where he's always saying, and we got to do it faster.
That's true. That's just some CEO stuff. I feel like if there's one book you get handed when you become the CEO, it's like, do it in half the time.
It's also worse because I'm from the news. So I'm always like, if we don't get this done by an hour, no one's going to care. That's a new thing for me that I have to get over.
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.
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.
We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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Psychedelics, so hot right now. Studies are showing they can help with PTSD, depression, even addiction.
But there's been kind of this, like, major problem lurking under those positive results.
It's basically impossible to take a psychedelic and not know that you've taken a psychedelic, which makes it pretty hard to have things like placebos or controlled trials.
And that kind of breaks the sort of fundamental logic of how researchers study how medicines work.
This week on Unexplainable, how psychedelics might be exposing some major cracks in the foundation of scientific research. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday.
This week on ProfgMarkets, we speak with chips market expert Patrick Moyert. We discuss Intel's fall from grace, what makes NVIDIA such a strong company, and his predictions for the future of the chip industry.
What I think I can tell you is NVIDIA will lose market share. But you know what? It doesn't matter. because the market is growing at a much higher rate that offsets any type of share shift to, let's say, AMD or these homegrown chips from the hyperscalers.
You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
Welcome back. I'm talking with The Onion's Ben Collins and Danielle Strelay to discuss why they're getting back into print and what it actually means to launch a print newspaper in 2024. Let's talk about the big decision here, which is launching a print newspaper. And then I want to talk about the writer's room and how it relates to the broader culture.
Launching a print newspaper does not seem like a plug-and-play idea. I saw a picture in the New York Times of the actual printing presses, and I thought to myself, where might one find those? How did you – again, this is – it feels like the group chat says we should launch a print newspaper, and then you have to go do it. What was the process of actually doing it?
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.
Oh my God, is it just like the Amazon third-party logistics economy allowed you to print a newspaper?
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.
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.
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.
Did you have to like buy the software again? No. The other chief has been there for 25 years. Did he pull out a dusty old Mac 2 and fire up InDesign?
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.
That's the exact kind of media problem I want to have. That's what I thought I was signing up for. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Also, like it's a whole writer's room full of like newspaper. There's two people in this writer's room of 15 people who designed a college newspaper. But also, like we know, you know, really when I knew this was going to work, we had already started going down this path. And I was like, let's do a test.
Night of the first debate, which we didn't know was going to be like the most consequential night of 2024, but whatever. I was like, let's just get everybody in the thing. We'll do the old fashioned thing. You guys can live tweet it and we'll make the front page of the paper again. And I had called my friend Josh Crutchmer, who designs a one of the New York Times.
And I was like, can you just help us put this together like on short notice? He was like, absolutely love to. And so we got we got everybody prepared for that night. And I was like, the best headlines we come up with that night, we'll put them in. We'll put them in a old fashioned, you know, onion front page and we'll put it out at the end of the debate. And then that fucking the world collapsed.
They were just on the ball. They were it was like being in a room of comedy writers for that night was one of the most special nights of my life, I have to admit. And by the end of the night, we had like eight banger headlines. I think the top head was that report nuclear war sounds fucking amazing right now. It's really good. It was a good head. And that's because we all felt that way.
I think the whole country felt that way. We made this front page, put it on Instagram, Twitter, and all these other places. And it got like, I don't know, what, over 100,000 likes on Instagram in like a couple hours. It was crazy. The response was crazy. And everyone was like... Man, I just I miss print. I miss print newspapers. I just miss this physical thing.
That's when I knew this isn't just going to be like a collectible memorabilia thing. Like we're on. This is a moment like we're on to something. Jordan LaFleur, our executive editor, was like, it's like vinyl for Taylor Swift fans or something like that. But it's also like a little bit more than that. Like you get to sit with this thing.
The internet's such garbage and you just, I find myself walking by these stacks and just getting distracted for 15 minutes. You know this, I'm the most like terminally online person there is. And I pick up this thing, I'm just like reading like the dumbest little jokes from like 25 years ago on this thing. There's something magical about it.
We did an offsite, Danielle and me and Lila and Jeff and Chad, our energy from Jordan. And we went to like some place in Michigan and Scott, yep. And we just like threw the old papers around, like a bunch of archive papers around. Daniel did it all around this house. And constantly in like the downtime, you would just find yourself just like flipping through it. It's like the old days.
Because on the next page, it's not like the New York Times or the Post or something. It's just like you're going to read some morose, awful thing on the next page. The next page, there's like eight more jokes. There's something just very nice about that. I don't know if this is perfect for every media company. I don't know. I'm not going to say that.
You know, they should bring back the New York Sun or whatever. I don't know what to tell you. But for The Onion, it's perfect. You get a place in time that's marked by this thing. And it has like end to end, just page after page of jokes. It's just a nice thing to have in your hands.
You said you printed 40,000 of them for the DNC. Was that just a shot in the dark guess? Was that based on signups? How did you make that decision?
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.
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.
So you're giving these out for free, this first set of 40,000. That's just the marketing, the lead gen. Are you going to give the next ones out for free as well? Is it you're going to have the box of jokes? By the way, my first one I picked up in Madison, Wisconsin, outside of Atomic Records. I had the same.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We believe enough in the jokes that we knew people would just, if they got one on the street, they would tweet it and they would put it on their Instagram. That has definitely borne out in the last couple of days. It's hard to keep track of. It's not a quantifiable, measurable thing.
But that's, again, we're in a lucky spot where we can do crazy stuff like this and just literally throw caution to the wind. We can just, you know, we can toss this stuff into the universe and, you know, believe in our writers and believe in our jokes. And so far it's worked out.
Let's wrap up just by talking about those jokes for one second. You have a long history in disinformation on these platforms. Onion headlines showing up on platforms' divorce of context are themselves an opportunity to provide misinformation. There's a competitor to the Onion called Babylon Bee, which is all wrapped up in the culture war in this exact way. The Onion has a point of view.
It has a politics. You can see it in the jokes. You can see the material right now, particularly on Palestine, for example. How do you think about that point of view? How do you think about the decontextualization of the work, especially as it relates to the internet?
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.
I buy that. I think my questions make it more specific. That makes sense in the bundle, right? When I was a young person reading The Onion in a bundle of headlines and a paper – There was a valence to the cover. You could feel it like this. Don't kill people. It's like an idea that comes across the onion, like quite often. Divorced of the bundle, right?
Unbundled, like almost all news is now across social media platforms, algorithmic in time and space. Sometimes that goes really sideways, really fast. And like Ben, you were in it, right? This was your beat. I'm just curious how you think about that.
Everything we do comes from a place of empathy, I would say, to some extent. And that has not changed. That's in part because Chad runs this place. He's been here for three decades. But when I grew up with The Onion, I grew up with during the Iraq War. My brother's 18th birthday was the day the Iraq War started. It's not a joke. The Onion was the only place that was just correct. Yeah.
Like it's just true. It was them and then eventually The Daily Show. But I was just – we were being constantly lied to by everybody. And The Onion was right and they were funny, which was good. It was a disarming and useful tactic to get people to – because their number one thing is that it's funny and that it comes from a place of empathy. That has not changed in any capacity.
In terms of like disinformation, a lot of it, as you know, I covered disinformation as a technological problem, a platform problem. Our stuff got dragged into that a couple months ago. Did you see the eating rocks thing, the AI thing? Yeah. A few months ago, if you Googled how many rocks should I eat per day on Google, you would get the answer was you should eat one to two rocks per day.
And it came from an Onion article from many, many years ago that was a bit on lobbyist capture. It was like America's geologists say you should eat one to two rocks per day or a small pebble or something. That got captured by a fracking blog. It was just aggregated.
The onion article was aggregated by a fracking blog, and that fracking blog got tossed into the AI feature at the top of Google's search results. That's a technological issue. And by the way, they owe us money for stealing our content, Google. Just letting you know that.
Oh, good. Like every media CEO, you've come on Decoder to demand money from Google. You're settling into the role then.
Yeah. Thank you very much. And also, like, you know, I would hope that I've always said this as a disinformation reporter, like jokes and absurdism. That's not disinformation. That's fucking being alive. If you're out there saying that Sandy Hook didn't happen and here are these families names. And by the way, they live in this town. That's a coordinated harassment campaign.
That's different than what we do fundamentally. And there are other websites, too, that that do satire that I find fundamentally unfunny. But like, fuck, they're allowed to do whatever they want to do. Like, that's not disinformation. That's a whole different thing.
Disinformation is it's a cottage industry of bullshit that is, by the way, only in existence because of the business model that we're moving away from.
When you think about the onion comes from a place of empathy, it is tempting to pigeonhole that as just some woke bullshit, right? I mean like Elon Musk likes to do that and it seems like you're being pushed into a political part of the culture war even if that's not the intent. Is that something that you're just OK with? Is that something you want to fight against?
I'm sure the onion would have been the climate in 2003. Yeah. would have been viewed as woke bullshit for being against the Iraq war. There's no question about that. And that to me is like some of the defining headlines of their time. 10 years ago, before woke bullshit was a sentence, you know, there's no way to prevent this as the only nation where this regularly happens.
Probably our most iconic headline of all time. You know, that would have been viewed as like woke bullshit by them too. The poison that is being pushed out by Elon Musk is his fault. And that's his thing they used to live with. But like, That's just not going to last. Being upset and impotent with rage and all that shit is a temporary feature of a failing political movement.
And we're we're an institution. We don't give a shit about the whims of crazy people.
Let me ask you just to wrap up here. You're launching the print edition at the DNC. You did the exercise to make a print edition around the debate. Something very radical has happened in American politics over the past five weeks and it does feel like one movement is captured by rage and does not have the momentum. We will see what happens in this election.
But it feels like one – the Trumpist world does not have the momentum and its rage defines it and the democrats seem to be pretty happy right now. There's Beyonce tracks playing. Everyone's happy. Eventually, you're going to have to satirize them, right?
And in this moment, even when we lightly cover the bad things that Democrats do because they have bad policy ideas and they are playing fast and loose with the facts in their digital campaign just like everybody else, I don't want to call it backlash. There's like an anxious fury that comes right back at you that says, if you screw with this, we're going to get the other guy again.
So just leave it alone. How do you think about that as expressing the union? Because if Kamala Harris wins – She's the most powerful person in the world. And The Onion has but one job, which is to make fun of her.
I mean, we took a lot of shit for going after Joe Biden in the last couple of years. There's no doubt about that. But the staff knows their role. They know what to do. And if you again, if you come at it from like an ethos, it's it changes things. Right. Your job is to challenge power and in any real way. And also just make jokes about everybody. Danielle is holding up an onion headlight at me.
We're doing it like we got an exclusive interview with Kamala right here.
Yeah. What's what's the last? Can you read through the last part of the Q&A? The very last. This is in the print edition that you're distributing. In the print edition. Yeah.
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.
What's the answer, by the way? What's the answer?
You've got to get the answer in print if you want to see it.
We're ending with like what is essentially a curiosity gap headline.
Yeah.
So we're going to wrap this up here. I'm just curious about that because I think there's at least one generation of people new to the electorate for whom every election has been existential. And the idea that our politics exist in a plane where comedy exists as well is kind of new to that new audience. And I'm curious to see how that plays out for y'all.
Because the Daily Show comparison to 2001, that was when I was in my 20s and it just felt very different.
Our big thing is we got to we got to move forward. I do recommend you like you. I can't believe I'm fucking saying this. Look at our tick tock. Like, honest to God, like we are we're building the foundation so we can move forward and build forward. And it's going to stop being 2016 at some point.
And I think we're we're in a prime position to pretend like those eight years never happened and continue to move forward from there. Look, these guys are ready for the fight. And again, I think if you pick up the Kamala Harris interview in the paper, you'll see kind of where we're headed. Apparently, give us $5. Give us $5.
Yeah.
All right. We got to end it there. As you can tell, I could talk to both of you about this forever and ever. We are going to have to have you back soon to see how all this is going. But thank you so much for showing up in the middle of DNC in the middle of this big print launch. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Thank you.
I'd like to thank Ben and Danielle for taking time to join me on Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads. I'm at Reckless1280. And we have a TikTok.
It's a lot of fun. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like the show, hit us with a five-star review. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media 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. We'll see you next time.
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