The Onion

The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is currently based in Chicago, but originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion began publishing online in early 1996. In 2007, they began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network. In 2013, The Onion stopped publishing its print edition. It was then acquired three times, first by Univision in 2016, which later merged The Onion and several other publications into those of Gizmodo Media Group. This unit was sold in 2019 to Great Hill Partners, forming a new company named G/O Media. Then, in April 2024, G/O Media sold The Onion to Global Tetrahedron, a firm newly created by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, which revived the print edition in August that year. The Onion's articles cover real and fictional current events, parodying the tone and format of traditional news organizations with stories, editorials, and street interviews using a traditional news website layout and an editorial voice modeled after that of the Associated Press. The publication's humor often depends on presenting mundane, everyday events as newsworthy, surreal, or alarming, such as "Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness". In 1999, comedian Bob Odenkirk praised the publication as "the best comedy writing in the country". The Onion previously ran The A.V. Club, a non-satirical entertainment and pop culture publication founded in 1993 that contains interviews and reviews of newly released media and other weekly features, and ClickHole, a satirical website founded in 2014 which parodies clickbait websites. ClickHole was acquired by Cards Against Humanity in February 2020 while The A.V. Club was acquired by Paste magazine in March 2024.