As a political disinformation reporter at NBC News, Ben Collins spent the past six years investigating extremism and online conspiracies. He probed the darkest abysses of the internet to uncover QAnon theories, militia plots, and sometimes a disturbing manifesto posted “on the worst website you’ve ever seen in your life.” It was, he says, “gruesome.”
Last month, he got a new job. He’s now CEO of the 36-year-old news parody publication The Onion, which he and three associates swiftly wrested from holding company G/O Media after watching the once-revered title, founded in 1988 by two University of Wisconsin students, go neglected.
Since making the switch, he’s much happier, as is clear on a recent Zoom call, when he sarcastically boasts that he will earn at least $50 million as CEO. Dialing in from his new home base of Chicago, where The Onion is headquartered, he admits he’ll miss New York. “But this city is filled with piss and vinegar,” he says. “And so am I.”
The Onion became famous for making readers laugh with headlines like “Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid,” and “Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch at 10:58 A.M.” But—like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight—The Onion also led incisive news coverage, addressing topics head-on where “straight media” couldn’t. After a 2014 mass shooting, The Onion first posted its story titled “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” The headline, which now has its own Wikipedia page, has since been reposted on the site 35 times.
By Collins’s own description, The Onion is “a funhouse mirror on American society.” Sometimes caustic and blunt, it can get under people’s skin—which he says is a good thing. It can open people’s eyes to what’s actually going on, or confirm that their beliefs are shared even when peers are too shy to utter them. “It’s a way to cope with how dogshit the world can be, and is,” Collins says.
The Onion is in many ways made for today’s incessant news moment. It has been covering the devastation in Gaza in an “incredibly brave way,” Collins says (“Advisors Assure Biden This Will Blow Over Once All Gazans Dead”). It has covered the heavy-handed crackdown on domestic protests, an upcoming election with scant public enthusiasm, the looming threat of authoritarianism, and more (“17 Days in Incubator Longest Time Premature Baby Will Go Without Being Exposed to Advertising”).
As CEO, Collins says he intends to unshackle the writing staff from creative constraints, share any generated wealth with them, and make sure their work gets seen.
Brandy Zadrozny, his close colleague and reporting partner at NBC News (the two had previously worked together at The Daily Beast) describes Collins as “the ultimate hype man. I could write a 10,000-word story, but he knew how to tell someone in two seconds why they should care,” she says. “Gallows humor was a daily part of our work life, so that will carry over.”
Forming a bloodthirsty megacorporation
Collins articulates his new mission clearly: It’s about “bringing the good internet back,” he says.
In fact, Collins had already begun stepping away from the bad internet. He had handed in his notice at NBC in January to write a book about disinformation. A hundred pages in, he wasn’t enthused about the project. “It was driving me insane to do the same work that I’ve been doing over and over again,” he says, “to just get yelled at by one of 17 people named Stephen Miller.”
As a distraction, he took an interest in what was happening at The Onion.
A rumor was circulating that G/O Media, which also owns Quartz and Gizmodo, wanted to get rid of it. Collins didn’t want the title to face the same fate as feminist outlet Jezebel, which G/O Media had stripped of its staff in November. Worse, The Onion could land in the hands of someone he considers “the most humorless person on the face of the earth,” Elon Musk, who expressed interest in it in 2014. (Instead, Musk founded Thud, a short-lived Onion-esque site that he shut down reportedly due to concerns writers might skewer his own companies.)
In a sense, Musk had been the catalyst for Collins’s departure from NBC. A year prior, he had been placed on a 30-day suspension from reporting on Musk, after NBC executives took issue with his tweets about the billionaire’s takeover of Twitter (now known as X).
It peeved Collins that his employer appeared not to be in his corner. (NBC News didn’t respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.) “To this day, no one can give me a straight answer about what happened there,” he says, recalling that NBCUniversal’s then-head of sales, Linda Yaccarino, became Twitter’s CEO a few months later. “I had the richest man in the world coming after me, and they took his side.”
After cutting the cord with NBC, Collins began cold-calling people who might be as interested in saving The Onion as he was. Particularly eager were Leila Brillson, a former marketing lead at Disney and Netflix and the first executive editor of Playboy; and Danielle Strle, former director of product at Tumblr. These connections led to others: Strle knew people in private equity and tech, and Brillson’s sister is an M&A lawyer. What they needed was capital.
As it happened, Jeff Lawson, the billionaire cofounder and former CEO of cloud communications company Twilio, had been eyeing the brand for years, having first considered buying it as a joke after fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff bought The Washington Post and Time magazine.
By early March, G/O Media had gotten wind of the interest from both Lawson and Collins’s coterie—and saw each faction needed the other. The foursome met in Chicago and quickly formed a company that would become their new Onion’s first joke: Global Tetrahedron, as described on its website, is a megacorporation that prides itself on being “pragmatic, focused, bloodthirsty, and fanatical.” On April 25, it purchased The Onion for a sum they decline to disclose.
New products, old products
Now comes the hard part: succeeding. Since it was founded at the University of Wisconsin, The Onion has cycled through at least five different owners. It started as a print paper, hosting cartoons, short fiction, and ad space for video rental stores. It has had a cable news network and a spin-off site, ClickHole. The publication moved to New York in 2000 to expand into books, TV, and movies, and to Chicago in 2012. The challenge today, Lawson knows, will be to “thrive in a new media environment.”
Lawson and Collins agree that the top priority is to “free the staff.” Collins envisions growing the business incrementally instead of emulating the “infinite growth” media takeovers of recent years, and then sharing revenue with unionized employees (currently 10 writers and editors, two art editors, and a video producer).
They plan to curtail the slideshows, which were created to draw in viewers but, as Lawson says, made for a poor user experience. “People inherently don’t see the 13th joke in a slideshow,” adds Collins, who vows to keep his hands off the creative process.
The Onion won’t shy away from ads, but in today’s landscape it will need new strategies, like a larger and more concerted presence on YouTube, and on TikTok, where 32% of U.S. adults ages 18 to 29 regularly get their news. Collins says the staff had never been afforded an appropriate budget to make the most of those channels.
But the new owners are determined to make some of the new products be old products. Collins is eager to bring back the print edition, for example, which was phased out in 2013, along with The Onion News Network, a spoof of the CNN and Fox News model that ran for 20 episodes on the IFC channel in 2011. These gambits may feel like relics of the past, but they could be lucrative: Collins says that he and his partners aim to keep The Onion free “forever,” but they may implement premium membership models for these additional items—as well as for podcasts, events, and merchandise.
After all, when Collins tweeted out a call for $1 donations to The Onion shortly after announcing the purchase, he and his partners were overwhelmed by the response. He won’t disclose exact numbers, but says they reached “tens of thousands” of dollars within 12 hours. “We gave them nothing, and we yelled at them at the end of it,” Collins says. “So, what if we give them stuff?”
“Eating The Onion“
Collins grew up with The Onion during the Bush and Iraq War era, when “all the adults in my life were ‘freedom fries’ people,” he says. Most people were glued to cable news, but he says only The Onion and The Daily Show were getting it right.
The Daily Show has had a renaissance this year with the part-time return of host Jon Stewart, but it has struggled to achieve the relevance it had then. The country is more polarized politically, and people agree even less about the truth. But The Onion has an advantage, which is that Collins’s reporting beat exposed him to people “living in different universes,” Lawson says. It has primed him to understand exactly what needs satirizing. Of course, the line often feels blurrier now between satire and reality. Earlier this month, Vanity Fair ran a story titled: “RFK Jr.’s Campaign Says the Worm That Ate Part of His Brain Won’t Affect His Ability to Serve as President.”
If people can’t distinguish truth from misinformation, they might find satire particularly confusing. There’s even a term that’s developed for falling for a satirical story—Eating The Onion—and Reddit has a group dedicated to those poor naïfs. In 2012, citing an Onion report, China’s People Daily newspaper reported earnestly that Kim Jong-un had been named the “Sexiest Man Alive.” The same year, an Iranian agency referenced a Gallup poll The Onion had fabricated, which suggested that U.S. rural white voters would prefer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Barack Obama as president. Last month, Twitter’s AI reposted an Onion headline declaring that O.J. Simpson will be allowed to continue living after his coffin didn’t fit. All this is worrying for humanity, but probably good for comedy.
But the concept of comedy has also changed. “Wokeness” has upset the most prominent comedians from The Onion’s heyday, including Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle. Arguably the biggest TV star of the time, Jerry Seinfeld, complained on a movie press tour last month that the “extreme left” and “PC crap” have killed comedy.
Collins doesn’t agree. “Stop being whiny babies, and try to make something funny,” he says. After all, he believes his staff is doing that day after day. He hopes to reopen a fellowship program to attract Gen Z talent to the newsroom, to help incorporate what they find funny, so that The Onion doesn’t feel like a fossil, but more like the younger generations’ “paper of record.”
Writers at The Onion have “the ability to lead, and also be the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet,” Collins says. “And that’s a unique opportunity.”
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