The Onion

The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that produces satirical content covering international, national, and local news. It currently operates out of Chicago, but began as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion started publishing online in early 1996, and in 2007 it launched the Onion News Network, which offered satirical news audio and video online. The print edition ceased publication in 2013. The company has been acquired three times: first by Univision in 2016, which merged The Onion and other publications into the Gizmodo Media Group; then in 2019, that unit was sold to Great Hill Partners, forming G/O Media; and finally, in April 2024, G/O Media sold The Onion to Global Tetrahedron, a new firm created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. Global Tetrahedron revived the print edition in August 2024.

The Onion’s articles parody the tone and format of traditional news organizations, covering both real and fictional current events through stories, editorials, and street interviews. The publication uses a conventional news website layout and an editorial voice modeled after the Associated Press. Its humor frequently involves presenting mundane, everyday events as newsworthy, surreal, or alarming—for example, “Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness.” In 1999, comedian Bob Odenkirk called it “the best comedy writing in the country.”

The Onion previously ran two other publications: The A.V. Club, a non-satirical entertainment and pop culture outlet founded in 1993 that features interviews and reviews of new media, and ClickHole, a satirical website founded in 2014 that parodies clickbait websites. ClickHole was acquired by Cards Against Humanity in February 2020, and The A.V. Club was acquired by Paste magazine in March 2024.

**History**

**Madison (1988–2001)** The Onion was founded in 1988 as a weekly satirical print newspaper by University of Wisconsin–Madison students Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson. Keck’s parents had both worked at The Hammond Times, and he had previously partnered with cartoonist James Sturm to sell monthly calendars featuring Sturm’s comics in The Daily Cardinal student newspaper. The idea for a newspaper of fake stories came from The Daily Cardinal’s annual April Fools’ Day parody issue. Keck says Johnson’s uncle suggested the name The Onion because of their frequent consumption of onion sandwiches; early comic contributor Scott Dikkers maintains it referred to “newspaper slang in the 1930s for a juicy, multi-layered story”; and editor Cole Bolton insists it mocked the campus bulletin The Union, alongside which early issues appeared.

In 1989, Keck and Johnson sold the paper to Dikkers; Peter Haise, their advertising manager; and Jonnie Wilder, their typesetter, for $16,000 (some sources say $19,000). After the sale, Keck and Johnson separately became publishers of similar alternative weeklies: Keck of The Stranger in Seattle, Washington, and Johnson of the Weekly Alibi in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In late 1990, Wilder sold her shares for $15,000 to work at board game publisher Iron Crown Enterprises. Haise left The Onion after 15 years and eventually opened a custom framing shop in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Dikkers claimed he was de facto editor by the third issue and became The Onion’s longest-serving editor-in-chief (1988–1999, 2005–2008).

In its early years, The Onion succeeded at several university locations, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The publication primarily consisted of a mix of Dikkers’s cartoons, Spy magazine-like satire, and short fiction. The bottom three inches of each page were reserved for ad space, typically purchased by local, student-oriented businesses like eateries and video rental stores.

In the summer of 1993, Stephen Thompson founded and became editor of the paper’s genuine entertainment section, which was dubbed The A.V. Club in 1995. In a 1994 interview with U. Magazine, Dikkers discussed Onion, Inc.’s plans to create a sketch comedy show called The Comedy Castaways, which they were pitching to NBC, Fox, and HBO. With a pilot and the first two episodes in post-production, Dikkers said, “I think what sets us apart is we’ve intentionally formed a tightly knit group of funny performers. A lot of these other shows are created by 50-year-olds, written by 40-year-olds and performed by 35-year-olds.”

In 1995, Dave and Jeff Haupt sold their shares of Cisco to purchase a $25,000 license to franchise The Onion in Denver, Colorado. The publication also licensed The Onion’s content for between $200 and $500 a week. According to the Haupts, the staff in the paper’s Chicago office were known to smoke marijuana while watching Cubs games on television. But the Haupts and their partner, Dave Rogers, assembled a more business-focused staff. While other editions of The Onion ran pages of stories without enough ads to support them, the Haupts cut content to avoid losses. Many at The Onion eventually regretted this deal. There were blowups when the Haupts refused to run especially biting headlines or when they made changes to the paper’s layout. “We might have been selling humor, but the business behind it was always very serious to us. The rest of The Onion was a complete disaster.”

In the spring of 1996, Ben Karlin and Dikkers collaborated with Robert Smigel and Dana Carvey to create four short Onion news segments for The Dana Carvey Show. Smigel said that after being introduced to The Onion by Bob Odenkirk a year earlier, “it jumped out at me as something completely original and great, and I really wanted to use it on the show.” Although four fake news segments anchored by Stephen Colbert were recorded, only one aired.