Decoder with Nilay Patel
How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
22 Aug 2024
Full Episode
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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.
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