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And even as a media criticism, the CNN piece wasn’t especially thoughtful-that cable news emphasizes shallow sensationalism isn’t much of an insight, after all. In an attempt to make a viral joke, the new Onion often makes an easy one. Whereas in the past, its political jokes were absurdist, surprising, and rarely partisan-an abortion point-counterpoint from 1999 pits “Life Begins At Conception” against “Life Begins At 40!”, a piece that I’m pretty sure elicited my life’s only legitimate spit-take-the new Onion sometimes aims for Jon Stewart’s game: ultra-clever but also a little scoldy, oversmart, and lacking much nuance. (It has earned almost 400,000 Facebook likes.) To me, though, the CNN piece illustrated one of the weaknesses of the new Onion.
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It was a typical piece for the new Onion: reactive, biting, and instantly viral. The traffic surge was due to the popularity of “ Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning,” a fake opinion piece that carried the fake byline of Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com. Last week-which coincided with the paper’s 25 th birthday-The Onion received nearly 6 million page views in a single day, a record. The company says that traffic to the site has grown 30 percent over the year. But in every way that matters, the people who produce the Onion now think of it as a website, not a paper.Ĭonsidering the magnitude of the change (and the fact that, for much of the past year, the paper hadn’t filled many of the positions left vacant during the move), the Onion’s transition has gone remarkably well. At the same time, the Onion adopted a new Internet-focused publishing process to use a bit of jargon that has infected the rest of the media, the Onion went “digital first.” The Onion still publishes a weekly newspaper in several cities (though the paper in its founding city, Madison, Wis., ceased publication in July). The move was traumatic, and many writers and editors, including then-Editor-in-Chief Joe Randazzo, left the paper. About a year ago, the Onion went through one of the most profound transitions in its history-a change you could see as ruinous or necessary, either the best or the worst thing that’s ever happened to fake news.Īs a cost-cutting measure, the paper’s corporate overlords-which, according to several former staffers, is very much the way editorial team has always thought of the business team-decided to move the comedians from New York to Chicago, where the business side operated. What happened to the Onion? Two words: the Internet. Whether you like the new Onion or not, something has clearly changed at the paper. She called it “the country’s best op-ed page,” arguing that its increasingly topical coverage “elegantly locates and dismantles a problem with an economy of words.”
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Pointing to its coverage of the Syrian civil war-from Bashar al-Assad’s “ Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People” to “ ‘Syrians’ Lives Are Worthless,’ Obama Tells Daughters Before Kissing Them Goodnight” to “ Obama Throws Up Right There During Syria Meeting”-Weigel worries that the paper risks turning “into a hivemind version of Andy Borowitz, telling liberals that what they already think is not only true but oh-so-arch.”īut in the New Republic last week, Noreen Malone marveled at the new Onion. Dave Weigel, another of my Onion-obsessed colleagues, is more critical. You’ll still laugh-but not as often, and not as hard, and sometimes you won’t laugh at all. One of my colleagues described what’s happened to the Onion as “a disturbance in the Force.” It used to be that you could open any issue and expect a laugh riot. Like the rest of the media, over the last year the Onion has gotten faster, bigger, more strident, and, to me, a little inconsistent.