How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral
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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.
And really, what it's 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 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 come 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 Strelay. Here we go. Ben Collins, you are the new CEO of The Onion. Danielle Sterlet, you are the new Chief Product Officer. Welcome to Decoder. Pleasure to be here. 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. 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 GeoMedia. I'm not even going to try to explain the genesis or the name of GeoMedia. But now you have a new company called Global Tetrahedron that owns the onion.
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