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Ben Collins

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
279 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

Like it's just true. It was them and then eventually The Daily Show. But I was just โ€“ 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 โ€“ 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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

Like it's just true. It was them and then eventually The Daily Show. But I was just โ€“ 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 โ€“ 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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

Like it's just true. It was them and then eventually The Daily Show. But I was just โ€“ 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 โ€“ 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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.

Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral

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.