How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

Today, I’m talking with Ben Collins and Danielle Strle, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion. And 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 that 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 remerged 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, was sold to a private equity firm and rebranded as G/O Media in 2019. The O presumably stood for The Onion.

We could do an entire episode on the calamity of G/O Media, but the short version is that it’s 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 Leila Brillson 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 Bluesky 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 has it 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 of 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 go 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 Strle. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Ben Collins, you are the new CEO of The Onion. Danielle Strle, you are the new chief product officer. Welcome to Decoder.

Danielle Strle: Pleasure to be here.

Ben Collins: 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.

DS: 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 G/O Media. I’m not even going to try to explain the genesis or the name of G/O Media, but now you have a new company called Global Tetrahedron that owns The Onion. Explain how we got here.

BC: 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. I was writing about Nazis on the internet and stuff. You know those people?

BC: I’m sick of those people. Terrible. I was reading Adweek, and I saw The Onion was for sale, and this was around the time where things were just shuttering. Sports Illustrated and Jezebel just shuttered — and it was from the same company, G/O owned Jezebel — or things were being turned into AI slop farms or Elon Musk was buying it. Worst-case scenario.

I posted on Bluesky. I said: “The Onion’s for sale, who wants to help me buy this thing? I have $600.” Leila Brillson, who’s in Chicago where The Onion is based, emailed me, and she was like, “But seriously, how do we do this? It’s an institution. We can’t let this thing die. It’s important to keep this thing alive.” I was like, “Let me just make some phone calls.” The first person I called was Danielle because she just knows. She ran product for Tumblr when that turned all of our children weird in America. Every single one of them.

DS: In the best way.

BC: In the best way. Not like JD Vance weird, like David Bowie weird.

We’re all goth furries now because of Tumblr. I get it.

BC: Exactly. I was like, “I think this is a special thing that we can go and go out and get.” We spent the next few weeks just calling everybody we knew, and we’re like, “Does this guy know a rich guy? How do we do this, exactly? How does this actually take place?”

DS: And we called The Onion Union.

BC: Yeah. The very first people we called at all were 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, contract negotiations — was to make sure that any content that was AI was labeled as such. That was really their big ask, and we were like, “That’s not onerous. That’s regular. That’s a good idea.”

Then, we kept pounding on the door, and we realized this might be a very good opportunity to save this 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. He 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 Bluesky and calling Danielle, we were in charge of The Onion. Kind of a wild ride.

DS: We’re 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. 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.

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. No one ever sees that middle part. Everyone takes it for granted, and you are firmly in the middle part, right? You were 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. “Well, I should just buy it and fix it.”

You have 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. 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. When you present it 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.

DS: I can talk some about this. 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 G/O about basically the P&L 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 just get a sense for, they like us, we like them. We love them! It was pretty quick after that. The following week, Jeff came in hot and was like, yeah, I mean let’s meet up and talk about this. We came back to Onion Global HQ and brought Jeff this time. Yeah, we were off to the races.

BC: In terms of the business model, by the way, I just want to bring up: Scott was the COO — right, Danielle? — of Gawker.

DS: Yeah. He started as an intern and ended as COO. I think he 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 an IT company from eighth grade.

BC: 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. Going into it, this did not just come out of thin air. We had all worked at these big gigantic places, and we were like, “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. We went into it being like, “Okay, so what would we actually do, then? What is working in our spaces?”

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 gave up on them a few years ago, right before the pandemic started. One of their employees at the time, this guy Sam Reich.

DS: Reich.

BC: Reich! He’s going to get so angry that I mispronounced his name. He’s the son of Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. Not a joke. He was like, “What if we just leaned into what we’re good at?” 

They stood up a niche 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 $6 a month. People are developing parasocial relationships with our talent — they’ll give us that. And I think, in a couple of years, they just leaned all the way into it, leaned all the way into big social moments that they do on YouTube Shorts and Instagram and stuff, and now one of their shows has sold out two nights in a row at Madison Square Garden.

They have a million subs, and they’ve just leaned into the stuff that they like to do that their audience likes. Their audiences paid up for it, and they’re happy. They like to give them money because that’s what it’s about. That’s what it was about before people got in their own heads about content on the internet in the last 10, 15 years, trying to play this big arbitrage game and basically gambling with content and stuff, and we can do that.

It’s not just them. It’s Defector and Aftermath and 404 Media and these places that were progenitors to this model. We can do this stuff first. We can lean heavily on our subscribers and try to make them really happy and give them something in the mail, 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 — stand up a company that’s based on people genuinely liking our content, not 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, 404 Media, my friend Casey [Newton] at Platformer have — the idea 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. 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?

BC: Well, we’ve already made $500 billion.

This is the real danger of interviewing people from The Onion, I would point out.

BC: No, 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 preserving this thing that we really love from our childhood or preserving this way of speaking about the world and thinking about the world?” We both realized, yeah, we’re both really serious about this thing. We really want this thing to live and be a good sustainable business that can turn out America’s best comedy writers. That’s what it’s done for 30-plus years.

We’re now at this place where we do trust each other that that’s what this is about, and it’s working. By the way, it’s good. Having a good sustainable business that makes money and is not trying to get an exit with the Saudi Arabian wealth fund. 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.

DS: 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 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 Marc 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 Laurene Powell Jobs needs to own The Atlantic so she can go to the parties because their enterprise software companies are not cool.

BC: 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. I understand it from his side, and there’s a nice benefit that it’s a pretty good business.

But he’s not expecting 10x returns in your first year or anything like that?

DS: No, he’s incredibly patient.

You really put him on the spot here.

DS: Jeff has enough money that he can be in this one for the love, but we’re also not a charity, and he is very rigorous with us about what our model says, how we’re meeting the model, 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 directly address their billionaire owner from time to time on the show. I think that’s important. That should become part of the Decoder rubric.

BC: 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. You buy the company — you’re in the mix. What did G/O have to say? Were they just [like], “Fine, please take this off our hands”?

DS: 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 G/O who definitely wanted to find a great home for it, and I think that we all feel delighted that this is the end result.

The Onion was rolled up into G/O. You mentioned you had to get them off Kinja, which is their software. They were also selling it. I’m sure they had their ad stock. You very notably took Taboola off the pages. How quickly, once you bought it, were you able to say, “Okay, we’re moving. We’re taking all of this archive and content and taking it somewhere else”? That is the big tricky hard decision.

DS: Too quickly, Nilay! 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. We were allowed to stay on Kinja for four months. I’m sure that they would’ve extended it if we needed longer, but yeah, we’re in a Slack room with the G/O 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.

Yeah, I looked at the site just now, and I was like, “Oh man, that doesn’t look like a Kinja website anymore.” Did you have to hire designers and engineers? How did you pick a platform?

DS: 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. Everyone has been so great. I would’ve 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 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 [WordPress CEO] Matt [Mullenweg] back on the show and be like, “What are you going to do with all of your untold riches and power?”

DS: Ask him what he’s going to do to keep Tumblr in its glorious state. Do that for me.

I ask him that once at 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 on your editorial.

BC:  We call it a writers room, but yeah.

Writers room. The unionized writers room. You’ve got Danielle out here 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?

BC: 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 this trying to save this thing, everybody else does. Everybody else has their favorite Onion headline in their head, so they really wanted to do it. 

There were 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 surface-level always. So, I know enough to not be completely humiliated 85 percent of the time. And thankfully, Danielle and Leila 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 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 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. What do people really want? And everyone was yelling at us to bring back the newspaper because they had an emotional connection to it. I grew up with it.

I remember exactly the first time picking up an Onion newspaper. It was in a box outside the Christian Science Center in Boston, and I was like, “There’s this free bucket of jokes. How is this possible?” I was proud to be an American or something. I was just like, “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, and people helping us run a business from the consumer side happy? And what do we want to do?” The paper was the obvious thing, so then we just had to fill in the gaps of, 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?

BC: What we said at the beginning is that we need to re-lay the foundation here, and the foundation is the paper. And the site on a day-to-day basis, but if we can have a paper that basically pays for the writers room and then do all this extra weird stuff on top, then this is a really good business. Over the years, they were best when they were nimble because they had the foundation.

They made ClickHole because the site was doing okay because of Univision and all this stuff. They made [Onion News Network] because they got an influx from YouTube money, but the site was doing okay at the time. It was doing all right. So now, 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, do weird stuff. That’s the way we look at it, basically.

DS: 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.

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”?

DS: 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 member contributions. We had an incredible party the other day up 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, “Okay, who is here in Chicago and 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.

Are you monetizing the website at all? Are you doing advertising on the website right now?

DS: Yes, we have classic Google Ads. We have a meeting today, actually this afternoon, about ad mapping for more 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 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 the ad load now is so much smaller than it was. It’s so much smaller than it was on Kinja.

I guess this is part of my question. And I think, Ben, you covered this very directly. It sounds like you live this very directly. This world, this 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, 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, could you get me 20 million people to look at this picture of a shoe?” And then things 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?

BC: It’s several things. And you know if you’re trying to get 20 million people to look at a picture of a shoe, that’s not 20 million people. It’s maybe half that at best.

It’s 10 million crypto bots, at least, is my understanding.

BC: Exactly. Right. And a lot of this is driven by good reporting — Craig Silverman back from the BuzzFeed days, who now works for ProPublica. A lot of it is a racket, man. It’s not real. If it isn’t a house of cards, that says more about us than 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 don’t have to. That’s it. When we got the company, we got the P&L, and we got the contracts and all this stuff, you do look at it — it’s extremely seductive. You see like, “Oh, wow, 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 a very hopium millennial bullshit thing, but I want people to like us and, therefore, pay us money to give us the thing. I want this to be a simpler business.

I think there are two economies in the area. One is 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, and they were living in the second one. And it also crushes your soul to try to feed that beast. It was doing that to our writers, and the weight has lifted off of them recently. We have some sort of responsibility to the world to turn out good comedy writers, and 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.

DS: If I had a time machine to go back and talk some sense into that guy who traded physical paper dollars for digital pennies on pricing internet ads in the first place, I would do it.

I think we all would. But it’s interesting because the push back then was that you shouldn’t have a paywall. You should never gate any information, and that 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. And 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 seeing the same result, but it’s two very different audiences.

BC: We’re four days into reading cross-tabs on this, so I wish we had better answers, but it’s both, and definitely, the response that we’ve gotten is all across the map.

As a previous disinformation reporter, I always say this: the lies are free and the good information is behind the paywall. And that’s part of the fascist economy of information, where one of the things that becomes a commodity that is hidden behind paywalls, just like the water wars in the future, is information. And you have to pay to read Puck or Casey’s newsletter, 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 get a good thing in your hands. For us, it’s the newspaper in the mail. The margins are pretty good. And you can show a sign of support. You can develop a relationship with us, but also, you’re doing a service by keeping this thing free in the future.

And that’s really what we want to do. So far, a lot of people have come out to do that, in terms of who is actually paying for it. We’re seeing people who are saying, “I am 20 years old,” or something, 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 description with my grandmother.”

It’s a cross-generational thing. Everybody’s version of The Onion is a really specific thing, 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 narrow joke about Arby’s or something. I have no idea. But the beauty of the place is that it adapts to the times, and everybody has their own sentimental relationship with it. So far, we’ve seen that. In the bare-bones cross-tab reading we’ve read, it’s literally every single generation. We get a lot of Gen X men. We get a lot of Gen Z women who liked the Palestine coverage. It’s all over the place.

I actually want to come back to 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 the 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?

DS: Pretty much!

What does it look like?

DS: I mean, 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, Leila running marketing. Ben is CEO. We’ve got Scott Kidder as CFO. We split time with him. He’s fractional, I mean, and everybody else, 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”?

BC: All of us came to that conclusion. All of us said that.

But somebody had to say it. Was there an all-hands meeting? How does it work to take over a well-oiled machine with a new group of executives?

DS: Oh, I mean, it was something that we talked about with the 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. When we announced it to the staff, there were happy tears. The end of slideshows were mentioned to cheers of joy.

It had been such a process for us to get through the transaction with Jeff and with G/O for reasons I don’t even remember. I think we were supposed to announce it to the staff on a Monday, and it ended up taking until Thursday to get it all done. But the following Monday, we came back into the office, and they’re just back on their regular grind. They meet in the writers 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.

BC: Yeah. Our editor-in-chief has been there for 27 years.

Does that stack roll up to you as well, Ben?

BC: 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 sacrosanct. It’s a way of doing things that actually I think other places could really learn from and help from.

So, 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 — usually, it’s around 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 got to talk through it, they check it off, and then they whittle those down over and over and over again. And by the end of the meeting, there’s usually — what, Danielle? — like 10 max, 5 to 10?

DS: Yeah, tops.

BC: 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 three or four per day. And that comes from that contributor network that has legit famous people in it, or it comes from the people in the room. And then only after all that did they go back, and they’re like, “That guy wrote that thing.” 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, we 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.

I’ve got to ask you this question, Ben, because you’re a new CEO, so I’m going to ask about you personally and then as a group — you and Danielle 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 decision. How do you make decisions?

BC: 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’s 30 years of newspapers in 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, talked to them, and we tried to listen to what they think The Onion is and tried to get every angle of it all the way around.

And then, we try to listen to people on, kids on TikTok who read our headlines and do the thing where they just point at it. And we listen to those people, too. 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 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, “Okay, 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: make sure that they have what they need to succeed and that’s really the whole process. I should write it down and have a book that is in airports called Drive or something, 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 FAANG company wants to have written a book like that, and this question is just bait for them, so welcome.

BC: That’s great.

You guys are a new executive team. You’ve all been friends, but you haven’t made a lot of decisions together. There’s a lot of weedsy kinds of choices you have to make. How have you decided to make decisions together? Because friends working together can be kind of dicey.

BC: Oh my God, yeah, of course. Danielle can talk about this, but we do have a call every single morning — at 10:00 in the morning — because she’s in New York. Leila and I are in Chicago. So, every day, we try to ward off, what I call, what I say with Danielle, call it bureauitis, which is — I learned this from an old journalism professor. He was talking about how people, if you’re like the London Bureau correspondent of The New York Times and you’re king shit of fuck city in London, baby, 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 everyone remembers that Danielle did this. Danielle made this newspaper. Danielle made this website. So, a lot of that is there, too. But yeah, I want to let Danielle talk about it because friends becoming business partners is a crazy thing to do, especially when you’re on this kind of timeline.

DS: Oh, yeah, Ben left out the part where he’s always saying, “And we’ve got to do it faster.”

BC: That’s true.

That’s just some CEO stuff. I feel like if there’s one book that you get handed when you become the CEO, it’s like, “Do it in half the time.”

BC: 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 news thing for me that I have to get over.

DS: We did a little offsite with the new executive team — Jeff and the top of the editorial side of the business — and we really did go through: 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 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.

Let’s talk about the big decision here, which is launching a print newspaper, and then I want to talk about the writers 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 of The New York Times of the actual printing presses, and I thought to myself, “Where might one find those?” Again, 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?

DS: Well, The Onion’s in Chicago. Funnily enough, there’s a lot of printing presses in the Midwest because it’s a central point for shipping.

Oh, my God, is this just, like, the Amazon third-party logistics economy allowed you to print a newspaper?

DS: 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 bachelorette parties with that printing press.

This is great.

DS: 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 Topweb. They’re known for printing a lot of multilingual newspapers that go all around. I thought for sure that we were going to need to get them the paper, I don’t know, a week in advance. That’s what I was initially building all of our calendars against. But two-day turnaround time, it was, I don’t know, not as hard as I thought it was going to be.

Did you have to buy the software again? Your editor-in-chief has been there for 25 years. Did he pull out a dusty old Mac II and—

DS: We did have to get new InDesign — 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.

BC: Also, it’s a whole writers room full of newspapers. There’s two people in this writers room of 15 people who designed a college newspaper. It’s just one of those things. But also, we 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 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.”

I called my friend Josh Crutchmer, who designs A1 of The New York Times, and I was like, “Can you just help us put this together on short notice?” He was like, “Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to.” And so, 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 an old-fashioned Onion front page, and we’ll put it out at the end of the debate.”

And then, the fucking world collapsed. They were just on the ball. 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 eight banger headlines. I think the top hed was, “Report: Nuclear War Sounds Fucking Amazing Right Now.” It’s really good. It was a good hed, 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 and Twitter and all these other places, and it got like, I don’t know what, over 100,000 likes on Instagram in a couple hours. It was crazy. The response was crazy, and everyone was like, “Man, I miss the print. I miss print newspapers. I just miss this physical thing.” 

That’s when I knew this isn’t just going to be a collectible memorabilia thing — this is a moment. We’re onto something. Jordan LaFlure, our executive editor, was like, “It’s like vinyl for Taylor Swift fans or something like that,” but it’s also a little bit more than that. You get to sit with this thing. The internet is such garbage, and I find myself walking by these stacks and just getting distracted for 15 minutes. You know this — I’m the most terminally online person there is, and I pick up this thing, and I’m just reading the dumbest little jokes from 25 years ago, and there’s something magical about it.

We did an offsite. We went to someplace in Michigan, and we just threw the old papers around, a bunch of archive papers around. Danielle did it all around this house. And constantly, in the downtime, you would just find yourself just flipping through it. It’s like the old days because, on the next page, it’s not like The New York Times or [The Washington] Post or something, like you’re going to read some morose awful thing on the next page. The next page, there’s like eight more jokes! And there’s something just very nice about that.

I don’t know if this is perfect for every media company. I’m not going to say that 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 end-to-end — just page after page — 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’d you make that decision?

DS: Dawg, I regret to inform you: I’ve 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.

DS: Yeah. I feel very lucky that our friends at Topweb have a fast turnaround time, but yeah, we need to print more for signups. It’s the DNC. Everybody’s here in Chicago. We’ve had three teams going around. 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 one? 

DS: Yeah, we’re giving these ones out for free.

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 issue of The Onion, I picked up in Madison, Wisconsin, outside of Atomic Records. 

DS: Everyone remembers their first time! Mine was also in Madison, Wisconsin.

We’ve actually gotten a number of inquiries from people in our membership who are like, “Hey, I have a coffee shop, or I have a vintage store, and I would love to… Was there some kind of membership that would allow me to put a stack of them out in my business?” 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 city of Chicago where the mayor has announced that 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, “If you guys gave me a rack, I would put this in the lobby. Let’s talk.” We do want to be open to discussing that kind of thing. But the 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 a college ambassador program or distributed distribution that happens from our special members and we sell the special subscription that gets you a bundle, we are pumped about all of those opportunities.

BC: We believe enough in the jokes that we knew people would just… If they got one on the street, they would tweet it, they would put it on their Instagram, and that has definitely borne out in the last couple 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 in the wind. We can toss this stuff into the universe and 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 in platforms divorced of context are themselves an opportunity to provide misinformation. There’s a competitor 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 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?

DS: Something that we’ve heard from the writers 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, but I think my questions make it more specific. That makes sense in the bundle. When I was a young person reading The Onion in a bundle of headlines in a paper, there was a valence to the cover. You could feel it — “don’t kill people.” It’s like an idea that comes across The Onion quite often.

Divorced from the bundle, unbundled, like almost all news is now across social media platforms, algorithmic in time and space. Sometimes that goes really sideways, really fast. And Ben, you were in it, right? This was your beat. I’m just curious how you think about that.

BC: 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 [Nackers] runs this place; he’s been here for three decades. But when I grew up with The Onion, I grew up 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. It’s just true. It was them and then eventually The Daily Show, but 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 — because their number one thing is that it’s funny and it comes from a place of empathy. That has not changed in any capacity. In terms of disinformation, a lot of it — as you know, I covered disinformation as a technological problem, a platform problem, and our stuff got dragged into that a couple months ago. Did you see the eating rocks thing? The AI thing?

BC: A few months ago, if you Googled, “How many rocks should I eat per day,” on Google, 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, 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. By the way, they owe us money for stealing our content, just letting you know that.

Oh, good. Like every media CEO, you’ve come on Decoder to demand money from Google. You’re really settling into the role then.

BC: Yeah, thank you very much. And also, I would hope that… I’ve always said this as a disinformation reporter, 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 family’s names, and by the way they live in this town, that’s a coordinated harassment campaign. That’s different from what we do fundamentally. And there are other websites, too, that do satire that I find fundamentally unfunny, but they’re allowed to do whatever they want to do. That’s not disinformation. That’s a whole different thing. Disinformation is a cottage industry 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. It’s just some woke bullshit, right? I mean, 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 okay with? Is that something you want to fight against?

BC: I mean, I’m sure The Onion in the climate in 2003 would’ve been viewed as woke bullshit for being against the Iraq War, right? There’s no question about that. And that, to me, is some of the defining headlines of their time. Ten years ago, before “woke bullshit” was a sentence, “There’s no way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens” is probably our most iconic headline of all time. That would’ve been viewed as woke bullshit by them, too. 

The poison that is being pushed out by Elon Musk is his fault, and that’s his thing that he has to live with, but that’s just not going to last. Being upset and impotent with rage and all that shit, that is a temporary feature of a failing political movement, and 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 with the 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 Beyoncé tracks playing. Everyone’s happy.

Eventually, you’re going to have to satirize them, and in this moment, even when we lightly cover the bad things that Democrats do because they have bad policy ideas and they’re 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. Just leave it alone.” How do you think about that as expressing The Onion? 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.

BC: 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 again, if you come at it from an ethos, it changes things, right? Your job is to challenge power in any real way and also just make jokes about everybody.

Wait, Danielle is holding up a headline to show me.

DS: Also, we’re doing it. We got an exclusive interview with Kamala right here.

BC: Can you read through the last part of the Q&A, the very last?

This is in the print edition that you’re distributing at the DNC?

BC: In the print edition, yeah.

DS: In the print edition, we ask her everything about, “Is Joe Biden nice in real life? What are your views on the death penalty? Who will you be voting for this November?” You’ve got to get it in print.

By the way, what’s the answer to, “Who will you be voting for?”

DS: You’ve got to get the answer in print if you want to see it. This is my paywall.

Alright, we’re ending with what is essentially a curiosity gap headline IRL.

So, we’ll 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 you because The Daily Show comparison to 2001, that was when I was in my 20s, and it just felt very different.

BC: Our big thing is we got to move forward. I do recommend you — I can’t believe I’m saying this — look at our TikTok, honest to God. We are 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 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 that Kamala Harris interview in the paper, you’ll see kind of where we’re headed. Apparently, give us $5. Give us $5.

Yeah, that’s good. You’ve got to end with a direct hard sell. As you can tell, I can 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 the DNC and the middle of this big print launch. I really appreciate it.

BC: Awesome. Thank you so much.

DS: Thank you.