The Onion

The Onion is a U.S.-based media organization with an estimated readership of four trillion people around the known universe. (Updated Mars subscription data is not expected until 2030.) The publication gets its name from the fact that it is printed on onion skin, making The Onion one of world’s biggest commercial consumers of onions.

OK, gentle reader, what appears above is a parody of an Encyclopædia Britannica entry—one we hope the creators of The Onion would approve of. But to be clear, the only thing factual in the preceding paragraph is that The Onion is indeed a U.S.-based media organization. For the rest of the real story, read on. And if you’re looking for an article about the food that is delicious sauteed and fried into rings, please click here.

Taking root in Wisconsin

What if They Had Eaten Reubens?

The names of newspapers usually make some kind of sense. They typically include a relevant location as adjective and then a traditional noun, such as Post, Times, Journal. But going the root vegetable route is pretty unusual. The story, told by founder Tim Keck, goes that Keck and his cofounder, Christopher Johnson, were so strapped for cash that they ate onion sandwiches while coming up with ideas for the paper. Johnson’s uncle suggested naming it The Onion.

One of the most successful and influential satire publications (we’re serious here) got started by two college students—Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson—in a dorm at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988. Keck, a native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, took inspiration from his hometown paper, the Oshkosh Northwestern. “At the time, [the Northwestern] was really bad, and the headlines were unwittingly hilarious,” Keck recalled. The pair began publishing a weekly black-and-white parody newspaper that quickly became popular with the college set. But a year later they sold the paper for $16,000 to Scott Dikkers, an Onion cartoonist, and Peter Haise, the paper’s publisher.

With Dikkers and Haise running the show, The Onion’s move toward intergalactic domination began, as the paper began circulating in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; and Chicago and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. In 1995 the paper switched to color, and a year later the paper began reaching an even wider audience with the launch of its website. In 1997, after almost a decade of publication, The Onion began to pay its writers and editors (no, we’re not making that up). By the end of the century, the paper was in a position to take a historic look back at the 1900s in a best-selling book called Our Dumb Century. When the book and its editors won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in Writing in 1999, The Onion’s transformation from upstart college passion project to the forefront of American comedy was complete.

Peeling back the layers of The Onion

“It’s the best comedy writing in the country, and it has been since it started.” —comedian and writer Bob Odenkirk

So, let’s go back to the idea of parody. Stories published in The Onion aren’t true; they are made up for comic effect. (Although not everyone always gets the joke; more on that later.) So the process for creating an edition of The Onion is unlike real journalism. To begin with, the writers come up with the headlines first (if you keep reading, we promise to reward you with some iconic Onion headlines from over time). Once a headline is signed off on, the writers craft a story that matches the headline. Just to reiterate, this is not how it works in real newsrooms.

In printAn edition of The Onion from December 12, 2013, the year it (temporarily) stopped publishing a printed newspaper.(more)

Part of what makes the parody work is the matter-of-fact manner in which the articles are written, mimicking the style of the Associated Press, whose stories appear in newspapers around the world. In that vein, one recurring theme of stories in The Onion is the trope of “Area Man.” That is, using the local newspaper convention of trying to make the news relatable to its readers. The convention has become so associated with the publication that NPR headlined a 2013 interview with The Onion’s editor in chief:

Area Man Realizes He’s Been Reading Fake News for 25 Years

As noted above, not everyone always realizes that what they are reading is fake. One of the most famous examples comes from 2012 when The Onion reported that People magazine had chosen North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un as its Sexiest Man Alive. The Onion’s story—citing “his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm and his strong, sturdy frame” as justification for the selection—was widely reported as true by Chinese media.

The Onion in the 21st century

In 2001, as The Onion’s fortunes continued to rise, the company moved to offices in New York City. By then the paper also included A.V. Club, an arts and culture publication that was not satiric but inserted into The Onion. In 2007 Onion News Network (ONN, a parody of CNN) debuted; it was canceled in 2012 but then resurrected in 2024. But not all extensions of the brand were successful. The 2008 movie The Onion Movie: Raw and Uncut was panned as vulgar and unimaginative.

The company endured much of the tumult that actual publishers of news suffered through in the 2000s, moved its offices to Chicago in 2012, and ceased publishing a print edition in 2013. It was bought in 2016 by leading Spanish-language broadcaster Univision only to be sold, along with Gizmodo, to a private equity firm in 2019. In 2024, as G/O Media (the renamed Gizmodo) continued to shed publications, The Onion was sold to a firm named Global Tetrahedron. The name was a wink and a nod to a corporation featured in Our Dumb Century and owned by tech billionaire Jeff Lawson, former NBC News reporter Ben Collins, former TikTok executive Leila Brillson, and former Tumblr executive Danielle Strle. As part of the company’s commitment to The Onion, it began again publishing a print edition—monthly this time—in August 2024. As of 2025 The Onion had roughly four million visits to its website each month, according to data from Semrush, which tracks digital traffic.

Despite the upheaval of ownership changes, The Onion found time to be serious about its commitment to parody and the First Amendment. In 2016 an area man was arrested for creating a Facebook page that mocked his local police department. (OK, his name was Anthony Novak, and he was from Parma, Ohio.) Although he was found not guilty on charges of using a computer to interfere with the police, he sued the city for violating his civil rights, appealing all the way up to the Supreme Court. That’s when The Onion filed an amicus brief (or friend of the court brief). In the 18-page filing, The Onion noted:

The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

The Onion Wins Bid to Buy Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy

The above is not a headline from The Onion but from The New York Times, published online on November 14, 2024.

The sale of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s website InfoWars was part of a bankruptcy filing in the wake of a $1.4 billion judgment against Jones for claiming repeatedly that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 children and 6 adults was a hoax. The judgment was ordered to be paid to the Sandy Hook families who had sued Jones.

When InfoWars was put on the auction block, The Onion’s bid was declared the winner—which owners of The Onion said the Sandy Hook families supported—but a bankruptcy judge blocked the sale because of issues with the auction process. In 2025 Jones appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the judgment, but the Court refused to hear the case. That, coupled with an August 2025 ruling from a Texas district court to liquidate InfoWars in order to pay the families, may resurrect The Onion’s ownership bid.

In a 2022 article NPR noted that after every major mass shooting in the United States in the previous eight years, The Onion had published the same headline, for a total of 21 times:

“No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Remember, none of these are true

Well, that was sort of serious and heavy and a bit of a bummer, but if you’ve gotten this far into the article, you deserve a laugh. So, below are some of The Onion’s most memorable headlines from over the years. It is worth noting—as The Onion does—that the site is not meant for people under the age of 18 and that not everyone finds the same things funny. Also, when you try to be funny about things in the news, you won’t always succeed. As an example, a 2011 tweet from The Onion about the evacuation of the U.S. Capitol and a group of children being held hostage by armed members of Congress resulted in an investigation by Capitol Police.

Quick Facts

Date:
1988 – present

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With that out of the way, here are some very Onion-y headlines:

• Perky “Canada” Has Own Government, Laws (published in 1996)

• World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 Percent

• CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
• Oprah Celebrates 20,000th Pound Lost
• Numerous Teams Express Interest in Aaron Rodgers Playing Elsewhere (The Onion’s roots are in Wisconsin, after all)

• War Over! 50 Years of Nuclear Paranoia Begin Today (from August 15, 1945, in Our Dumb Century)

• Fall Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons

• Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People

Tracy Grant