Danielle Strulé

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, tops. Around there.

Oh, yeah. Ben left out the part where he's always saying, and we got to do it faster.

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.

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.

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.

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.