[percussive music]
- Murv Seymour: Christine Wenc, welcome to "In Focus."
- Christine Wenc: Thank you, thank you for having me.
- I'm excited to have you, I mean, my goodness,
one of the founders of the iconic "Onion."
- I'm not a founder. - No?
No? - I'm not a founder
of "The Onion."
I worked there. - How do you describe it?
- Well, my roommate founded "The Onion," actually,
Tim Keck, who I knew from my freshman year
in the dorms at UW-Madison,
and his friend Chris Johnson
were the ones who founded "The Onion."
- Gotcha.
- But Tim asked a bunch of his friends to be a part of it.
And he knew that I was a writer
and was interested in journalism and all that stuff.
So he actually originally hired me to be the art director.
I was, like, I was 19 years old and I didn't know what that was.
- Yeah.
- But I actually became the copy editor.
But I did, yes, but anyway-- - Well, you--
- But yeah, but that's where I-- - But you were involved with it
in terms on the ground level.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I was there on day one
through into the next couple of years,
but I didn't have anything to do
with "The Onion" becoming famous.
But I did wanna write about "The Onion" becoming famous.
- How in the world did the idea start?
Or something like that? - Well, Tim had done a little
this sort of other publishing venue with a friend of his,
a cartoonist named James Sturm.
I actually just bought one of Sturm's books
here about 10 minutes ago.
- Oh, and I should say, we're in Arcadia Books
here in Spring Green. - Yeah, Arcadia Books.
- This is, you're from Spring Green.
- I grew up in Spring Green, yeah.
- Yeah. - I went to high school here.
I lived here from age 4 through 17,
so I went K through 12, right here in town.
- And how does it feel to be back home?
- It's nice, yeah.
I was walking around a few minutes ago and was like, "Wait,
"I haven't been here in a couple of years, I don't think,
even though I live in Madison now."
And it was nice 'cause like, oh, right.
'Cause everything is so-- I have many,
many years of memories all over the place.
So it's fun to kind of walk through that.
- And do you feel like your Spring Green,
your days on the mean streets of Spring Green,
taught you anything about funny
and taught you anything about humor and that sort of thing?
- I think that, yeah, that's an interesting question.
My time in Spring Green was, wasn't really about comedy.
It was about being, I was, like one of the, like,
punk rock, new wave kids.
Like, one of, like, five of them in the entire,
like, you know, tri-county area or whatever.
And what I did learn about,
I think, was, like, looking at society from kind of the outside
and in a kind of a different way.
Like, through the art lens of kind of art and,
you know, music and that kind of stuff.
So when I went to Madison,
you know, then I sort of found my people
and, you know, went on from there.
- So you end up getting involved with "The Onion"
and you kind of knew nothing about stand-up comedy
or humor and that sort of stuff?
- No, no, I mean, well, I mean, I grew up, you know,
like, my dad had a subscription to "National Lampoon,"
which he would, like, hide, you know,
and I would find it and bring it out again.
I used to-- I actually grew up in,
out in the country about eight miles outside of town,
most of the time, and I had a very long bus ride,
and I used to read, like, Woody Allen books on the bus
and, like, laugh my head off for,
like, the 45-minute bus ride and things like that.
So, you know, my dad had a good sense of humor.
He was sort of a practical joker a little bit.
So there was, like, some of that stuff
happening in the house all the time.
And my parents definitely encouraged, you know,
looking at things, you know, through the lens of humor
when there were difficulties, I think so, yeah.
- And what do you remember about your roommate
in terms of how he came up with this whole idea?
- Well, Tim had, like I said, Tim had been working on
this calendar thing that he was doing with Sturm.
Sturm drew the pictures, and Tim sold ads to attach to it.
And basically, he needed to, like, make some money, you know.
He was like, running out of money,
and he didn't wanna get a regular job, so he--
And the thing about Tim
that's really important for the story, and this is,
I outlined this at the beginning of the book.
He actually came from a newspaper family,
like a major kind of Chicago-area newspaper family.
His dad was an editor at the "Hammond Times"
of Hammond, Indiana,
and his mom was one of the first
environmental investigative reporters there.
So he grew up in a super saturated newspaper environment.
And so when he needed to make some money, at the time,
they were like a billion free newspapers all over Madison.
It was like that was,
it was like sort of the social media,
in a weird way, of the time.
And so it was very natural to Tim to be like,
"Well, maybe I'll start a newspaper," right?
But the thing is, he didn't know what to put in the newspaper.
He just wanted to make the newspaper.
So it started out, unlike many publications,
it started out, like, he just needed to make some money.
And then it was like, "We gotta put something in it."
And then a friend of mine,
I introduced my friend Matt Cook to Tim,
and Matt was an improv comedian
at a place called The Ark Improv in town,
and Matt was a good friend of mine also.
And so Matt was like,
"Why don't we just make it all up?"
And Tim was like, "That's a great idea."
So that's what we did. - Murv: Wow.
- So yeah, that was the genesis of it.
- What could go wrong just making it up?
- Yeah, we'll just make it up.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no,
like, it's funny 'cause sometimes people think
there's some, you know, very like,
like high level, you know, concept.
But I think it came,
it came up very spontaneously in response to a lot of stuff.
And everybody was, like, 20.
So I mean, we were just, like, babies working on this.
- And there's probably a generation out here now
that aren't familiar with "The Onion," maybe?
How would you describe "The Onion" newspaper?
- Well, it was a newspaper, for one thing.
Remember newspapers?
It's like, you know, made of paper, and it's on newsprint.
[laughs] It's news on paper.
No, it was a weekly and it was, we had,
there was a very intense grind
to, like, produce that thing every week.
And a lot of it was written at,
you know, 3 o'clock in the morning,
you know, before they had to go to the printer
at, you know, 5 o'clock in the morning kind of thing.
So there was a lot of kind of spontaneousness in there
and lots of freedom, and the first,
it was almost a zine in a way at first,
because it was very free-form.
But the thing from day one, though, it was always,
it was always meant to be funny,
but it never pointed to itself as comedy, right?
So people would pick it up and be like, "What is this?"
You know, like, "What are these very strange stories?"
And people would try to kind of fit it
into their existing paradigm and get like, "Oh, it doesn't,
it doesn't fit," you know.
And so that was fascinating to people.
And every issue was different.
And so people started picking it up
and it became successful, like, almost right off the bat.
So Tim was able to pay his rent, like, very quickly after that.
- So now, is there anything symbolic in the name
in terms of, you know, onions and onions make people cry
and crying is what people do when they laugh hard enough
and all that kind of stuff?
Is there anything to the name from that standpoint?
- Nope, nope, I mean, Tim swears up and down,
and I have asked him several times, like,
"Is this really the story, Tim?"
And he's like, "Yes, it's really the story."
So the story is that nobody had any money.
Like everyone's living on, like, peanut butter and jelly.
But apparently he and his partner Chris Johnson
ate a lot of onion sandwiches.
And one day, Chris's uncle was there, and he's like,
they were trying to come up with a name for the paper.
They were like, "Maybe we'll call it 'The Paper'
and maybe we'll call it 'The Rag.'"
And his uncle was like,
"Why don't you call it 'The Onion?'"
And they were like, "Sold," right?
Like, that was it.
You know, I've looked online sometimes and there's,
people are like, "Oh, it's 'The Onion' is a name
for like a multi-layered news--"
And I'm like, "No, no, no."
I don't know where that stuff is coming from.
Like, it's, there's no--
it doesn't mean, like, layers of meaning or anything.
It's like, it's basically a spontaneous thing.
Like, many things happened that first year.
- So 1988, first headline goes up.
I forget the headline.
I thought it was something, Mendota...
- Mendota, "Mendota Monster Mauls Madison?"
- Yeah, yeah.
So, how long did it take before things caught on
and this was like, the paper to kind of get your hands on?
- I don't know exactly, but it was pretty fast.
I mean, people, even now, people come up to me
and remember, like, issues from that first year.
I think that the paper,
the thing I remember about "The Onion,"
and I talk about the business side of "The Onion"
actually a lot in the book.
They, you know, they needed it to,
like, support itself,
and they needed it to, you know, give them, like,
a little bit of extra money to, like,
make their rent and stuff, so.
I mean, my memory is that it became, you know,
it was the students were mostly reading it,
but it became successful, like, pretty quickly.
I mean, Tim describes it as being, like,
almost immediately, it was successful, right?
And then they were like, "Uh-oh,
now we have to keep doing it," right?
- Murv: Yeah. - So it was successful
right away, which I, which was interesting.
- Yeah, and I'm gonna grab my little prop here
because you mentioned the word "book."
And, you know, as people listen and watch this,
one of the reasons we're talking to you,
because you spent six years on writing this.
- Yeah.
- "Funny Because It's True."
And what, first of all, even made you wanna dive in
to tell the story of "The Onion?"
What made you, what caught your attention?
- I first thought of this when, so I moved.
I lived for about 20 years on the East Coast.
I was in New York and Boston for a long time.
And I moved back here in about 2017.
And, you know, you think about, you know,
"Oh, I went to college here."
And like, naturally, I started thinking about "The Onion."
It was during the first Trump administration.
And on a particularly interesting news day,
I was, you know, listening to NPR and going,
"Wow, I wonder what 'The Onion' people think of all this?"
'Cause I hadn't thought about "The Onion" really.
I hadn't paid much attention to "The Onion" myself
for a long time.
And I also,
and then when I started googling around,
I also discovered that there was actually
a lot of information online about "The Onion" that was--
"The Onion's" history that was actually pretty inaccurate.
And, you know, I had done graduate work in history,
and I'd been a journalist in the past, so I was like,
"Wait a minute, like, I can't, you know,
"we can't all die and have no one, you know,
know, like, the actual story of 'The Onion,'" right?
So, and I know that, you know, the history
is written by the people who,
you know, were able to write it down.
And what's, you know, the historical record
is not necessarily accurate sometimes.
It's one of the things you learn when you study history.
So it was partly, you know,
trying to make sense of what was happening at the time.
You know, remember, there was all this talk about fake news
and all this kind of stuff.
So those combination of two things, like,
made me want to write the book, so.
- Yeah, and after I spent the last week or so,
you know, doing my best to get through this book,
and I got through it probably about two hours
before we sit here and talk.
- Yeah. - But it seems to me that
it's a great kind of account or evolution
of, you know, where "The Onion" started,
how it started, and kind of what it evolved into.
What was your thought process in terms of
how you put it together and what you were trying to tell?
- Yeah, so I realized early on that the history of "The Onion"
is also the history of media since the '80s,
the history of news and the media.
In order to satirize something well,
you have to really understand it.
And I realized that, oh, I'm gonna need to learn more
about the history of what they were satirizing,
the history of what they were doing a parody of,
because, you know, everything is in a context.
And I didn't want to tell the story,
like, in isolation of the world "The Onion" was existing in.
And so I, it was really important to me
to also have it be,
it's kind of like a stealth media history as well.
And I talked to media scholars and that sort of thing
to kind of flesh it out and make sure I was, like,
on the right track and that kind of thing.
So I'm hoping that people will sort of by osmosis also,
you know, understand that there's a reason
why we have the media that we have now.
And, you know, this story, in a weird way,
will kind of help you understand that.
- Yeah, you also talked about
some of the local weekly papers
in the Madison area. - Christine: Yeah, yeah.
- How do you think that influenced
the work that "The Onion" did?
- Well, there's a, they first--
"The Onion" was not produced, it was a--
People think of it as a campus newspaper,
but it was independent of campus.
However, its primary competitors
were the local campus newspapers,
which were "The Daily Cardinal," which was, like,
the left-wing paper, and then "The Badger Herald,"
which at the time was, like, the right-wing paper.
And, Tim, you know,
in one of my interviews with Tim Keck,
he explains that, you know, the "Cardinal" was,
there were things about the way
that they presented their politics that were, you know,
it was, it wasn't always appealing to folks,
even if they, like, agreed with them, right?
And then on the right wing, this was sort of
the beginning of, like, the Young Republicans.
There was a lot of really just disgusting
and abhorrent and like, awful stuff
that was being published in the right-wing student newspaper.
And so, as Tim describes it, he's like, "Everybody,
you know, people didn't really like either one, right?"
So "The Onion," you know, sort of went into the middle of that.
And it kind of, it was like an alternative
to the college papers.
- I thought it was interesting reading,
you talked about it was important for "The Onion"
to look like a real newspaper. - Yeah.
- Like they looked at "USA Today."
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And some national publications
and kind of stole some of the ideas and the,
not ideas, but the look. - Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- Now, why was that important for them?
- So this was a few years down the road.
It took a good probably five, eight years
for "The Onion" to kind of find its "mature style,"
if you can call it that. [chuckles]
And when they went from black and white to color,
in around like '94 or '95,
they really wanted to go, like, all out with this is,
this is, like, a complete sort of reproduction
of, like, a real newspaper.
So writing everything with,
according to very strict AP style was really important,
kind of borrowing the components of "USA Today,"
like the graphics and the, you know,
the page layout and, you know, the way that headlines worked
and that kind of stuff, they really wanted it to be,
very much exactly like a real paper.
They loved it when people thought it was real.
And part of the reason people would think it was real
was because it was such a brilliantly done,
like, reproduction of a real newspaper.
- Yeah, I remember this section, you wrote about
one of the folks that worked there.
They said they would go to the Union--
- Yeah--
- And just kind of hear people talking about it.
And they'd love nothing more than to hear someone
talking about one of their headlines as if it was real.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, they got a big-- the '90s staff,
especially the people who kind of created what we think of
as "The Onion's" voice-- they were always,
they were always very entertained
when people thought "The Onion" was real.
- And I also, as I read about this evolution
of the paper and the staff--
- Yeah-- - I got the impression
that not many of them
really had a background in comedy or humor
in a professional sort of way.
- Christine: Mmh-mmh, no, no. - How is that possible?
[Christine laughs] How'd they pull that off?
- Well, it's interesting,
I mean, they were writers, you know.
They were, they were--
a lot of them had been at "The Daily Cardinal."
And I should underline that, like, everybody had,
almost everybody had very strong progressive values,
but they wanted to express it in a different way.
So a lot of them had actually been cartoonists
at "The Cardinal," so they were
also used to expressing things in a visual way,
and the visuals of "The Onion" are really important.
But I would say, I don't know.
It was like, everybody was very well-read.
Everybody was kind of very,
kind of intensely, like, self-educated, you know, people.
It was just normal to sit around and talk about, you know,
books and music and, you know,
that was just what everybody was doing.
And they had, I think that they had a lot,
some of them, at least, had values
they wanted to express through their satire, and that's,
that's kind of how all that stuff kind of mixed together.
But yeah, but they were not the--
that original crew-- I'm thinking of the '90s crew--
were not at all like, you know, ambitious,
you know, we want to be famous.
Like, none of that was really happening.
They just wanted to write, like, really good satire.
- Murv: Yeah. - So.
- Now here's something that stood out to me, like,
literally from the first chapter.
- Yeah.
- None of your chapters have names.
That was, that was so... [Christine laughs]
To me, I felt that was so "Onion"-like.
I don't know if that's purposeful
or you're just being lazy.
Why are there no chapter titles?
- I did have chapter titles originally,
but we just decided to not do it.
One of the things I've learned--
- It just seems like an "Onion" thing to me.
Like, it's totally-- - Yeah, yeah, well, I mean,
it's like sort of stripping it down and you're presenting
it very straight, you know.
And I also wanted people to, you know,
not go into it with, like,
your interpretation being sort of directed,
you know, by the name of the chapter.
Like, it's, let's just read it and see what happens.
And it also kind of made it more like a novel, I think.
- Yeah, I found each chapter to be a,
I guess, a different evolution of where the,
you know, the paper was,
where the team was, where some of the friendships
and some of the business relationships were and were not.
I also got this great sense that there was this divide
between the creative side and the business side.
- Yeah, yeah. - What was that all about?
- Well, that's, like, kind of the classic thing
that happens in many organizations,
the creative versus the business and how those interact.
I guess the sort of,
I'm trying to think of a short way to say it.
Early on, editor Scott Dikkers
and business manager Pete Haise,
who were two of the three co-owners
of "The Onion" at that time,
they decided to erect a firewall between business and editorial.
So basically, business did whatever it wanted,
editorial did whatever it wanted.
And that was really important, but later
when "The Onion" got much bigger after it went on the internet
in '96 and became super famous,
in 2001, Dikkers sold out his shares
in "The Onion" to an investor.
And then in 2003, Haise did the same.
And so after that, "The Onion" then became like an investment,
You know, it became like a thing that the owners--
you know, I mean, they loved "The Onion"
and wanted to keep it going, but it, the business,
had, like, a different kind of paradigm at that point.
And so "The Onion," you know, became a thing
that had to make somebody a lot of money.
And the satirists being who they were, they, you know,
that resulted in some pretty intense clashes.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- I also thought it was interesting
and it actually made me laugh 'cause again,
you just, you kind of bring this historical kind of
a vantage point in terms of how you tell the story.
- Yeah, yeah. - I thought it was interesting
that you talked about there was this,
like, a standard of what an "Onion" joke
kind of contained. - Yeah.
- Do you remember what those, what the pieces of that were?
- Well, there was, what's interesting,
"The Onion's" process is what's interesting to me.
And that made me, like, kind of gain
a huge amount of respect for how they work.
Their, they, "The Onion,"
"The Onion" is known for, like, its headlines, right?
There's a "This American Life" episode
that takes place in "The Onion" writers' room.
So basically every writer would come to the meeting
with, like, 20 headlines.
And so they all get put together and they all kind of pick a few.
But basically, it's sort of like, for every 100 headlines,
like, maybe three or four get in.
And so there's this very intense process that kind of helps
the quality stay really high.
I think that's one of the reasons "The Onion's" like,
people still read it after, like, 35 years
or something, almost, going on almost 40 years,
which is amazing to me.
And part of the reason that is still happening,
I think, is because of their process
through which they write their headlines
and write their stories is kind of designed
to keep the quality high.
- I also got a sense that a lot of its success was,
kind of just happened, like wasn't really planned.
It's just kind of the way things went.
- Not at first.
- I even heard, I read somewhere in there
someone described it as a house of cards...
- Yeah, yeah. - ...that could go down.
How does that, how did that work?
- Well, that, I understand that is the business side of it
was, I mean, "The Onion"--
there was this funny period in the '90s
when "The Onion" was starting to get famous
after they went on the internet.
But "The Onion's" business was still
like a local Madison business, right?
So the editorial side is, you know,
getting profiled everywhere.
You know, they're being written up in "The New Yorker,"
and Anderson Cooper is coming out
to interview them and all this kind of stuff.
And yet, "The Onion's" business is like, you know,
like still selling pizza ads, you know, and so,
the writers were like, "We don't understand, like,
why isn't this business part getting bigger?"
But the business part, you know,
I think it was actually run, you know,
decently for what it was.
You know, they made a profit enough to pay everybody.
You know, they kept the thing in business.
But that sort of,
I don't know, clash is maybe too strong of a word,
but it was a very strange, schizophrenic feeling,
I think, for them a lot of the time.
But the house of cards was the idea that,
one, they could also be, like, sued out of business at any time
because as "The Onion" got bigger,
they also, you know, would attract the attention of people
who didn't think some of the jokes were very funny.
And so, like, there was that too.
- Murv: Yeah. - But, yeah.
- I love reading about the part, speaking about the internet age.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And, you know, the internet comes around in the mid,
late '90s, I guess. - Christine: Yeah.
- And so now you've got a choice to,
or they've got a choice to go out and get a domain name.
- Yeah, yeah. - Murv: And they're like, "Oh!
"That's gonna cost 400 bucks.
"You know, do we wanna spend that kind of money
on something like that?" - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- People have newspapers and this and that, and--
but they took the leap of faith in that,
and that probably ended up changing the game for 'em.
- Oh, yeah, no, it was huge.
It was huge because at the time, this was is '95.
I think '96 is when the website actually started.
And, you know, at the time, you know, if you,
if people remember, you know, the internet hype in the '90s,
people were, you know, it was easy to be skeptical about,
like where it was going to go, what effect it was gonna have.
Publications in general were like, "We don't really,
like, what do we, how do we do this," you know?
- Murv: Yeah.
- And "The Onion" wasn't any different than a lot of other,
you know, "real" newspapers that were also
trying to figure out how to go online.
But when they did, "The Onion"
was kind of the one of the only humor sites on the internet.
And by that point, they'd been working on their thing
for, you know, years.
And so they appeared there sort of fully formed,
and it took off just, like, immediately,
like almost a matter of weeks, as I understand it.
They just kinda went supernova.
- Yeah, 'cause without the internet and that sort of thing,
I'd imagine all the other great things that happened,
you know, some of the big books.
- Yeah, exactly. - You know,
the television network
and some of those kinds of partnerships.
I guess those things probably don't happen
without going into the internet like that.
Like how, where did it grow from?
'Cause at some point, they end up moving,
you know, to New York City. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so as part of the dot-com boom
that was happening at that time,
"The Onion" did go through a period of trying
to sell itself, you know.
So like, you know, Pets.com is getting zillions of dollars
and all these sort of, like, URLs are getting tons of money
for being sort of concepts.
But there's a kind of
what I think is a pretty funny part of the story
where they've got a representative going out
to California and they're trying to sell themselves as a website,
you know, and nobody wants to buy them.
And so they decided to go to New York
when they were about to, they were going to probably
be bought by Comedy Central, which was new at the time.
This is 1999, I think.
And then that deal unfortunately fell through
because the dot-com bubble burst,
like, literally at the same time, like in the same month
that they were trying to finish this deal.
- Wow. - And so that didn't happen.
Everybody thought they were going to New York.
And they were like, "So you know what?
We're just gonna go to New York anyway," so they just went.
They just took themselves to New York, yeah, in 2001.
- What are some of the headlines you remember?
Do you remember some of the headlines that you,
some of your favorite ones?
- I think there's been, there's just been so many.
There's just, like, thousands of them.
I like the silly ones a lot of the time.
One of my favorites is, uh,
I can't even say it without laughing,
"Archaeologists Discover Ancient Race of Skeleton People."
[both laugh] That's,
that's definitely one of my favorites.
I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was, like,
a little girl in rural Spring Green, so anyway, yeah.
- The one I remember vividly
was "Mother Teresa Sent to Hell in Screwy Mix Up."
[Christine laughs] I don't know if you
remember that one. - Yeah, I don't think I remember
that one, but why did you like that one?
- Well, there was another one.
I forget the actual number, but it was, like,
"394 Voted Favorite PIN Number."
[Christine laughs]
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's like their sort of slice-of-life style of joke.
- Murv: Yeah.
So we move past, you know, we move past the TV shows.
A few books have come out.
There's some money coming in and "Onion's" kind of,
probably, maybe even on an international level
at this point. - Yeah.
- And then I guess somewhere in there,
they decide that they wanna shut down the New York office
and move things to Chicago.
- That creates a little... - Yeah.
- ...kind of, you know,
drift between, you know, some of the staff.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- But even that still turned into something
probably good for "The Onion."
- Yeah. - Describe that period for us.
- Well, that was a big, big deal
'cause everything was going really well in New York.
But at that time, the business office was in Chicago
and the editorial office was in New York.
So they were having a lot of problems
with games of telephone, you know, back and forth
and trying to get everybody on the same page.
And the business office decided that,
"Look, it doesn't make any sense for a business,
you know, working at this level to have two offices,"
especially one in a really expensive neighborhood.
And at this point, the original New York office
was in a much cheaper neighborhood.
But now, they were in Soho, in a really expensive,
you know, I'm sure their rent was crazy.
And so they announced that
they were gonna shut down the office, but it was very,
it was very, very controversial.
And there were news articles about it at the time.
But "The Onion" editorial staff sort of put together
a kind of a rebellion of sorts
and tried to find another buyer for "The Onion."
Baratunde Thurston was a leader of some of that.
And they wanted to find some way
to keep "The Onion" in New York and were, you know,
kind of fought tooth and nail.
But in the end,
it all kind of fell through when an editor
that had been gone for a while came back and said,
"No, I'll be the new editor in Chicago."
And so then they did move to Chicago.
But it was a big deal because about 85% of the staff quit.
So they had to kind of start over again
with a much smaller group of people in Chicago.
- Yeah, and the organization's been bought
and sold a few different times. - Mm-hmm.
- Was it owned by Elon Musk at one point?
- No, well, I think Elon Musk apparently,
I don't have all the details on this,
but Elon Musk did apparently at one point
was in the running to buy "The Onion."
I mean, there were a lot of people, you know,
that's one of the things I learned through this process.
Well, it's interesting 'cause in the 2010s,
especially the-- "The Onion" became like a lot
of other media companies,
and, you know, got bought and sold
and was trying to kind of cope
with the internet kind of advertising paradigm,
and the way, you know, Facebook was altering how,
you know, revenue worked and that kind of thing.
But at one point, Elon Musk was apparently in the running,
But he did not buy "The Onion,"
but he did take a couple of "Onion" staffers.
He hired them away to do, like,
he wanted to make his own kind of comedy website,
but it didn't go very far. - Murv: Yeah.
And so, most recently, it was about a couple of years ago.
- Like last year, yeah. - Okay, still based in Chicago?
- Yep, still based in Chicago, yeah.
- And I think just recently reintroduced the newspaper form.
- Yeah, they did, yeah, they're back in print again.
They finally are sort of freed
from sort of corporate, you know--
I was gonna use a bad word, but--
- No bad words on PBS. - But I was,
this is PBS, I can't use a bad word.
They were bought by a guy named Jeff Lawson,
who was also a tech person, and new CEO Ben Collins,
who is a former disinformation reporter.
And they kind of--
"The Onion" was gonna be up for sale,
and so they bought it and they sort of--
they bought it with the goal of, like, setting it free.
And so since then, they have been set free
and they've brought back the print edition,
which went away in 2013, but now it's back again.
And I think people are really excited about that,
'cause lots of folks think "The Onion" works best in print.
You know, it's something you can hold in your hands,
and it has a beginning and a middle and an end and so,
so now, of course, I subscribe right away.
And now, you know, I have a middle schooler
who's an "Onion" fan, so, yeah. - Murv: Yeah.
So there's still some hope
that it could rise back to the glory days.
- Yeah, yeah, I don't know, you know, we'll see what happens.
I mean, they're in a really difficult
media environment like all the other, like everybody else.
But you know, we'll see what happens.
- Yeah.
We're gonna get you out of here on this.
I had, you know, I'd been a fan of the paper for quite,
since right out of college. - Yeah, yeah.
- And I always thought I could write for 'em.
I've got some headlines I wanna try on you
and see what you think about 'em.
Gimme your true thumbs up, thumbs down.
"Boring Interview Leads to Spike in PBS Ratings."
- Uh... - Yes?
No? - Yeah, I don't know, yeah.
- "Long-Haul Trucker Happy for Rising Gas Prices."
- [laughs] Yeah.
- "Long-Haul Trucker Adds 19th Wheel."
- That's, yeah, that's a good one, yeah.
[both laugh]
- "Mother Nature Oversleeps and Forgets to Start Winter."
- Mm, that makes me think of, like, Greek mythology, right?
Isn't that the--
- "Cheese Curds Beats Warm Buttermilk in Super Bowl."
[Christine laughs]
That made Alma laugh.
My camera person. - Christine: Okay, good, yeah.
- "Fake Newspaper Contains Artificially Enhanced Language."
- They're fighting against that, actually.
It's in their contract.
They're, like, unionized.
No AI, yeah. - Oh, that's good.
- Yeah. - That's good, keep it real.
- Christine: Mm-hmm. - 100% real.
"State Street Renamed Stumbling Boulevard at Bar Time."
[Christine laughs]
"Reporter's Headline Causes Onion to Tear Up."
- Oh, interesting, yeah. - I liked that one.
Of course, I wrote that one. [Christine laughs]
"Company Holds Meeting to Schedule Upcoming Meeting."
- That might actually be an "Onion" headline.
- Oh, no way! - Yeah.
- I wrote that yesterday, man. [both laugh]
"PBS Interview Leads to Quicker and Longer Sleep Time."
- But for who? - Ah, that's the question.
- Yeah. - And we'll leave it there.
- Okay. - Murv: Christine Wenc.
Thank you so much for joining us on "In Focus."
- Thanks, Murv, it was great to be here.