My reaction to The Onion being sold

Anything's better than the old regime, but figuring out a lasting business model won't be easy

The Onion has a new owner! That’s 100% a good thing. The Onion was never going to thrive under its most recent owners — G/O Media and, previously, Univision.

If you asked me on Jan. 1, 2024, whether The Onion would even exist in 2030, I would have given you less than 50/50 odds.

G/O Media seems especially incompetent as a media business. It starts with the little things, like deleting The Onion’s old photos and infographics en masse for part of 2022. More broadly, G/O Media’s lack of care for The Onion’s website, archives and reader experience is disheartening — and unnecessary. There doesn’t seem to be much investment in supporting the staff’s efforts. After all, how was The Onion doing more (and better) video in 2008 than in 2024?

G/O Media’s not even as good as former staffers at running Gawker Media-like sites! I’m speaking of Defector Media, which has been successful so far.

(Disclaimer: I say this as an outsider with no inside information, just my observations and reading over time. If there’s an Onion staffer who thinks the site’s been run well — or that Univision was worse! — I’d love to hear a rebuttal.)

Great, a sale! What’s next?

Let’s wait and see. A sale won’t change the challenges The Onion faces:

• A changing media landscape hostile to ad-based, general-interest publications.

• The need to publish constantly, across channels, without time for deep joke construction or reflection.

• The broader pivot to video and audio, which The Onion can do well but isn’t its founding medium.

• The competition from thousands (millions?) of people inspired by The Onion to do similar satire and parody, all without facing the barriers of launching a print publication and hiring staff.

I’m glad for the enthusiasm of the new ownership, starting with the inside joke of naming the company Global Tetrahedron. I love that The Onion’s immediate response was “Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.”

Hiring former NBC News reporter Ben Collins as CEO? That’s … interesting. 20 years ago, I suspect, The Onion would have roundly mocked a “disinformation” reporter being hired to run a satire publication. And being CEO is wildly different from being a reporter. But again, let’s wait and see. Good to have someone who loves The Onion in charge versus someone who doesn’t understand it.

As a very, very amateur Onion historian, I’m happy to see this transaction. I don’t know what The Onion can become in 2024 and beyond, but I have more hope for the future than I did a week ago.

And, no matter who owns The Onion, I’m always rooting for its staff to continue the publication’s work and tradition.