The Onion

About The Onion

The Onion is a Chicago-based American digital media company that publishes satirical articles on international, national and local news, billing itself as "America's Finest News Source." Founded as a weekly print newspaper on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin, it grew from a college-town alternative weekly into the most influential news satire operation in the world, parodying the tone and format of traditional journalism with stories, editorials and man-on-the-street interviews presented in a deadpan Associated Press style. After passing through ownership by Univision and G/O Media, it was sold in April 2024 to Global Tetrahedron, a firm created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, which revived its print edition that August. Along the way it spawned two notable sister publications: the non-satirical entertainment site The A.V. Club and the clickbait-parody site ClickHole.

Founding in Madison, Wisconsin

The Onion was founded by two juniors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, who published the first edition on August 29, 1988. Keck, the youngest child of a Midwestern newspaper family, started the paper with his friend as a way to make money; an improv comedian among the early recruits suggested the paper consist entirely of made-up stories, and the concept stuck. The following year, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to Scott Dikkers and Peter Haise for less than $20,000 — the Washington Post later reported the figure as $16,000. The paper was at first a success only in a limited number of cities and towns, notably college towns such as Madison, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago and Boulder. In those early days the entire bottom two inches of the paper could be cut off for coupons to local Madison establishments, and the food budget was so tight that the staff was, by one account, down to white bread and onions.

How it got its name

The paper's name came from an almost absurdly humble origin. According to company president Sean Mills, recounting what founder Tim Keck told him, it was Chris Johnson's uncle, Wm. Nels Johnson, who suggested the name when he saw Keck and Johnson eating an onion sandwich — they had literally just cut up an onion and put it on bread because that was all they could afford. The name stuck, and it has been the subject of endless speculation ever since, most of it far more elaborate than the truth.

Finding its voice

The Onion did not arrive at its signature style immediately. In the beginning it was a parody of the National Enquirer; its first headline was "Mendota Monster Mauls Madison," about a monster supposedly sighted in Lake Mendota near the UW–Madison campus. The distinctive voice — the sober, wire-service tone applied to mundane, surreal or alarming fictions, from "Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness" to deadpan editorials — developed over the following decade. The publication's humor often depends on presenting everyday events as newsworthy, and its editorial voice is modeled on that of the Associated Press. By 1999, the comedian Bob Odenkirk was praising it as "the best comedy writing in the country."

Going online and going national

The Onion began publishing online in early 1996, and the website transformed a regional print paper into a national phenomenon. In 2007, it began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network, extending the brand into broadcast parody. The move to Chicago consolidated its operations: in 2012 the publication consolidated its staff in Chicago, and in December 2013 it published its final print edition — on December 13, 2013 — moving to an all-digital format after citing 30 percent year-over-year growth in page views to its website. It also launched Onion Labs, an in-house advertising agency. The digital era made The Onion a global brand; its headlines became so convincingly deadpan that satirical pieces were periodically mistaken for real news, a phenomenon the publication itself has documented and joked about for years.

Sister publications: The A.V. Club and ClickHole

The Onion's corporate family produced two significant spinoffs. The A.V. Club, a non-satirical entertainment and pop-culture publication founded in 1993 as a supplement to the paper, grew into a major outlet in its own right, featuring interviews and reviews of film, television, music and games. ClickHole, launched in June 2014, parodied clickbait websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Both eventually left the fold: ClickHole was acquired by Cards Against Humanity in February 2020, with its staff becoming majority owners, and The A.V. Club was acquired by Paste magazine in March 2024. A third spinoff, StarWipe — a satirical take on celebrity culture launched in September 2015 — was closed in June 2016.

The Univision and G/O Media years

In January 2016, Univision Communications acquired a stake in The Onion, and later that year it bought the company outright, merging it with the former Gawker Media properties into the Gizmodo Media Group. In April 2019, that unit was sold to the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, forming G/O Media. The private-equity era was difficult for the publication: former staffers describe a period in which the focus was on driving pageviews, producing slideshows and chasing programmatic ad impressions — a traffic-driven strategy that sat uneasily with the paper's comedy-first traditions. Through it all, The Onion kept publishing, and one of its darkest running jokes achieved a grim fame: the headline "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens," republished after nearly every American mass shooting since the 2014 Isla Vista attack.

Global Tetrahedron and the print revival

In April 2024, G/O Media sold The Onion to Global Tetrahedron, a new Chicago-based firm whose name is itself a joke — a reference to a fictional "multinational behemoth" featured in The Onion's 1999 book Our Dumb Century. The firm was created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson together with Ben Collins, a former NBC News disinformation reporter who was born the same year The Onion was founded and who became the publication's CEO. The stated vision, in the words of chief marketing officer Leila Claire Brillson, was to "unshackle The Onion from this very traffic-driven strategy of pageviews and programmatic ad impressions." In August 2024, the new owners revived the print edition — now a monthly subscription paper — and longtime editor Scott Dikkers said he could see the difference: more stories, less clickbait, a return to the paper's happiest traditions. Later in 2024, the company placed the winning bid for the assets of Alex Jones's Infowars in its bankruptcy auction.

Signature features and recurring jokes

Beyond the headlines, The Onion's regular features have included editorials, street interviews ("Americans" reacting to the news), infographics, the "Onion News Network" video operation and long-running parody formats. Its humor ranges from the surreal to the pointedly political, and its best work functions as genuine media criticism: the G/O Media-era slideshows, for instance, were described by former staff as a meta-critique of the media industry's race to the bottom. The publication's fictional universe — its fake staff, its fake history, its recurring characters — has been elaborated across books, including Our Dumb Century, a parody of 20th-century newspaper front pages, and a devoted readership treats its internal mythology with the seriousness of a shared joke.

Cultural impact

Few comedy institutions have shaped American media literacy the way The Onion has. Its headlines are quoted by politicians, cited in classrooms and mistaken for real news with such regularity that the phenomenon has become part of the brand. The paper has been the subject of serious academic and journalistic attention — including a Harvard Gazette interview with early staffer Christine Wenc, author of the book "Funny Because It's True," about the paper's origins — and its writers have gone on to staff the country's leading comedy institutions. The 2024 sale was widely covered as a feel-good media story: a beloved satirical institution rescued from private equity by owners who professed to love it. Under Global Tetrahedron, the paper has invested in longer stories, new editorial concepts and audio and video formats, betting that comedy — not traffic — is the business.

Place in the Chicago media landscape

Though born in Madison, The Onion has been a Chicago institution since it consolidated its operations there in 2012, and its 2024 rebirth under Chicago-based Global Tetrahedron rooted it in the city once more. In a media landscape defined by consolidation and cost-cutting, it remains an anomaly: a comedy publication that survived the death of alt-weeklies, the collapse of the pageview economy and two rounds of corporate ownership to emerge, improbably, with a print edition again. The official website is at theonion.com.