The Onion Knight Ft. Ben Collins

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3:07On April 25th, 2024, GeoMedia, the private equity project best known for running websites like Deadspin into the ground, announced that it was selling satirical news, newspaper, and website The Onion to a company called Global Tetrahedron. Though few knew it at the time, Global Tetrahedron was an entity run by former NBC News disinformation reporter Ben Collins, funded by billionaire Jeff Lawson, best known for founding Twilio. As a note, Global Tetrahedron is a reference to the company of the same name from The Onion's anthology book, Our Dumb Century. In one of the first bits of good news I've had to share on this show, The Onion is now owned by somebody who has not only done a job in journalism, written things, researched things, and worked in a news organization that didn't burn to the goddamn ground, he also cares about the future of the newspaper, best known for headlines like Study Reveals Babies Are Stupid, Jurisprudence Fetishists Get Off On Technicality, and Mark Zuckerberg worried Facebook listening to him after being pushed shut that says, I just laid off 10 ,000 employees.

4:14Today, it's my immense pleasure to be joined by The Onion's new CEO, Ben Collins.

4:25Okay, so how did this deal to Buy The Onion actually come together? Okay, so I was, it was January. I just quit my job right before Christmas. And I was writing a book about like some of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet Earth. Right. You know, the Elon Musk's and the Jim Jordan's of the world. And I was like super depressed and I was like I was plowing through it, but it wasn't. I'm having fun. Yeah, exactly. I have no idea. I don't even know if it was good. I think it probably was all right. But like the the process was horrible. And I read in ad week that the onion was aggressively for sale.

5:08And I had known and I remembered that Elon Musk had once tried to buy the onion. Right. He wound up poaching a bunch of staff and started this thing called thud, which never really launched. He from what I've heard from some lore in the office, by the way, is that they after about a year, he didn't think anything that these former Onion writers wrote was funny. And this was like a peak era of the Onion. So he just shooed them away off campus, off the Tesla campus where he had originally put them or the SpaceX campus and into this like weird remote area. um and then it just died a like a sad and it died the death of like a guy dying in the desert in a video game yeah that's what happened um so i was worried that he was gonna try to snap it up or uh like the ai all the people who buy these like websites and turn them into like weird zombie ai farms i thought that was oh yes that that seems pretty likely yeah and i really i really did not want that to happen like the onion was a very important part of my life grown up and right kind of remains that way and it's like the last uh it's the last american news institution that has been completely unsullied i would say um and also a rare good hit rate for decades there's not really been a slump yeah exactly uh even in the last year when all these other news organizations are really fumble in the bag it's like tripping over themselves uh they weren't you know they were very clear about ai and gaza and all these other things that uh people fell into like some really weird rhetorical traps for themselves that they are now having a hard time getting out of the onion didn't do that like one of their headlines from last year was a guy who sucks at being a person sees huge potential in ai which is just fucking right this is really good yeah anyways Yeah, so I, um, I'd read in ad week that it was very for sale.

7:09And, um, I put on blue sky. I said, uh, does anybody want to save the onion? I have like$600 or something. Right. And, uh, my friend Lila Wilson, who lives in Chicago was like, the onions like a Chicago institution. Like if this thing goes away, it's like a really bad thing. Like, who do we call to make sure somebody decent ends up with this thing? so I was like, I don't know, let me just make some calls and I'll see what it costs, I guess, or see what it is, see what's going on with it. And I just kept making phone calls. I just kept going. I just kept like being like, how would I, like, if we were to buy this, like, how would we make money?

7:51How do they make money now? Do they make money now? What's going on with this thing? Right. And a couple of weeks later, we were just in the thick of it. Like eventually we had we had collected enough people who knew a rich guy or you know uh to to get in the equation and uh then there was you know there was this guy named jeff lawson who had just left twilio which is like a company and um he kind of felt the same way about it that we did and we had you know we just kind of like constantly were in assurance to each other that neither of us was going to mess this up that we're all going to like leave the processes be at the onion that makes it great.

8:32And then it just happened. Like I, you know, within, I think like eight weeks, it went from like a hilarious joke in my house. Like I was telling my girlfriend, I was like, I'm gonna buy the onion, whatever. And then in like two weeks, it was like, I think I'm gonna actually do this. I think this might actually happen. And then in eight weeks, it was pretty much done. Like we were, we were fighting off some last second bidders who were particularly ghoulish but like um any any clarity on who those might be uh they're in the news oh okay but uh yeah it's there you know but so perhaps a very direct question is so jeff lawson he's a billionaire ran twilio quite rich how are you going to avoid what has happened with a lot of tech investor projects.

9:22Because for the most part, they've been pretty good. But generally, when they start, like Jeff Bezos has not really backed the Washington Post. He doesn't seem to feed it more money. And the same kind, like Benioff buying Time, and Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, bought Time a few years ago. And he, again, does not seem to have, like, he doesn't seem to have messed with it, but he also doesn't seem to have helped it. What's the plan with Jeff Lawson? Well, we're going to do profit sharing. We're make sure the staff if it does well they get money for us like it's just straight up what it is um you know he views this as a pub like a public interest thing just as we do that it's an american institution and if it dies it sucks like it's bad for everybody we need we need somebody to just um aggressively needle bad people and uh like this is not his money-making enterprise i think he already did that um but like the goal of it is is to yeah the goal the goal of it is to make an environment where writers can make money for doing good writing like it's just a weird idea yeah so with that in mind what's the actual plan to make money how does it make money now and what's the plan for the future okay cool i actually want to talk to you about this because this like fits with how we talk about stuff you and i like when we text about yeah yeah i think it's important so So the way The Onion used to make money under GeoMedia is basically one way.

10:48It's programmatic advertising. So programmatic advertising is this horrible thing that sort of ate the internet and sort of ate our politics in the world. It's all those like, you know, those like one weird trick ads. Yes. And they're currently all over the bottom of the page. Yeah. When people think of inshittification, this is probably what they're thinking about, right? Right. And that's how they make money right now. And I now on the other side of this, I get it, right? If you were to you can run a business like this, where it's really low margins, and, you know, you have a small staff. And on top of that, basically, you just keep running websites where that's if you're updating it a little bit, you'll remain at the top of Google or whatever.

11:32And then you get enough of these impressions. So that these horrible ads just keep, you know, showing up, literally tenfold sometimes And it was like a hundredfold underneath. And they get paid by the impression rather than the click through. Right. Exactly. So like it's, it's like, it would be like if, if every car that drove by a billboard, um, there, there was a, there, you got paid for an eyeball, right? Every thousand cars. Right. Exactly. And then you get paid even more, obviously, if somebody clicks on that. So the incentive structure is bad to begin with, but then the incentive structure from the person selling the thing on your website is even worse.

12:07So it's just like, can I tell you my favorite programmatic advertising? Please go. Larry Bird wife ad. One second. Larrybirdwifead.com. Oh, yes. I know the one we're going to. I'll put a link to it in the episode notes. I do want to. Can I read it to you? Please do. Please read it to me. It is meet Larry Bird's repulsive wife. which is not an onion headline right that's an actual programmatic clickbait advertising

12:45you click on it it's exactly what it says it is it's them making fun of how this woman looks and she's not repulsive by the way but it's just one of the most and that's an automatic is that it's i guess it was before ai generation that came out so there was a guy who was like you know who you know i'm gonna take the boots too today larry bird's ugly wife i'm gonna i'm gonna take her down a few pegs it's the 2020s you know what it's time for all the fame busted one just but that's the thing when you get websites and you can even see it on big ones like nbc and i've mentioned this before these programmatic ads are everywhere like outbrain things there's on cnn as well so you'll get like international news international news politics and then the thing about how your hearing aids should be better and you can buy them from a special website that's full of spyware and it's just crazy and this is most of the media but what do you what are you going to do with the onion though because yeah and i also want to say by the way that design language of that sort of thing that sort of animatedness and and uh how how they even physically look you see places like the new york times sort of copy that because people are used to that the design language of chum box ads they're called chum boxes yeah and it just makes everything worse our politics sort of sound like that now the way people talk sort of sound like meet larry bird's repulsive wife like that's just sort of how things that's how it feels like american life right and i it can't be good it just can't be good so how are we going to make money great question um in a diverse way that is not that like there there's uh a several part strategy that we have First of all, we're going to, I don't want to like blow our load here a little bit, but we're going to have a membership that maybe brings back the newspaper.

14:34Yeah, cool. And we're excited about it. We're going to sell direct ads. So like ads that want to like companies want to directly deal with us. We're going to do that. We're not going to be like a fifth party vendor to some to to scaring people on the Internet. Companies that want to deal with us, we want to deal with them, too. And like that's another thing. There's a thing called – we're basically going to write some ad copy where we are also aware that there hasn't been a funny Super Bowl commercial in like fucking 15 years. So we do want to be in that business too. So wait, would you be making Super Bowl commercials for other people?

15:08Well, we'll be making ads for other people, yeah. Right. And there's several different ways we can go with video that we're currently trying to figure out the very best one. but all of those ways sort of, you know, they bring in cash. And then there's just a lot of ways to do this, and we're going to do a little bit of everything. But, like, I would say, like, the number one way you can do it is, like, subscribe to us when we launch our membership product, but we just want it to be really good. So we want the staff to own it and be, you know, and we want to hear more feedback about what people want in a membership from us in a newspaper.

15:43So we're just taking our time with that.

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19:59So perhaps this is one you can't necessarily speak to yet, but how much time do you have? how has lawson been very clear that this will take time because that feels like the biggest failure of every digital what failed digital media product that i've seen the last few years yeah i mean he's patient with the idea that this does take time to get a build out a thing that uh you can't in what it's been six weeks or something you can't just like completely flip around an entire business and like we have to get out of contracts we have to get out of whole thing like there's a bunch of stuff that we have to do to get out of that previous business um that oh so you're actually unbuckling parts of the geomedia the hydro yeah i mean like you know we're in their old building where there's just a lot of stuff that you have to do we have we had to set up a whole you know set up a whole business with health insurance and all the other stuff that that you would do when you buy a business and uh and a lot of it is unlearning stuff right we're part of part of the previous business right if you are doing programmatic advertising as your primary business you're doing slideshows all day you are telling people you're driving people to a slideshow and telling them to click the button over and over again to get a new freshly set like freshly created set of ads right and we have to get this you know it's demoralizing to the staff um we have to get them in and the uh mindset that like maybe the best joke is a tiktok video maybe the best joke is um is a whole newspaper maybe it's a physical object like how do we actually satirize our current times right now and not just you know the internet from 10 15 years ago uh getting that mindset with the writer's room is important and uh until six weeks ago they didn't they had no idea who was going to take over this place or if anybody who was going to take over it would keep them on board so uh i think we're you know part of it is just winning their trust and uh we're well on our way that's cool and you mentioned kind of expanding the media side like as it's weird over the years the onion went from having probably some of the freshest media content to being mostly written there was a time when you had like i don't know any listeners who remember this i've used all this but get out of my face was one of the best comedy products of the last decades it was a sports show much like around the horn except both hosts just completely hated each other and most of the sport but then it went away and it felt like the onion went very writing based which is fine it's good stuff but so you're going to expand that then right exactly first of all my favorite part of get out of my face they had a segment where i think it was called who should we assassinate and they would just pick a sport they're picking athlete to assassinate i just remember one where It was just him screaming about how Pennsylvania is a giant abandoned parking lot, and he couldn't wait to get home and shave his entire body.

22:54Anyways, multimedia now. So you're going to start expanding into video, I hope, again. Yeah, that's important to us because there's two reasons for that. First of all, the reason it became a text-heavy thing is because of the business of programmatic advertising. They were just feeding that beast straight up. So we want to get out of that and do bigger things. Second of all, we've accidentally developed this massive fan base among the kids. Because in the last year, if you watched CNN or MSNBC or if you read the New York Times or something and you were 22 years old, you were just getting fucking yelled at by old people.

23:35Like, that was it. That's just what was happening. Still kind of all. Yeah. It was like, your feelings aren't valid and literally get off my lawn. That's what they were saying to them. Right. That was the last year of coverage. And we weren't like that. Like we, you know, we've we've said, first of all, your feelings are valid. You also may be right. And also, you know, there are a lot of parallels to previous parts in history where the onion also stood up when it was unpopular. For example, like during the Iraq war, they stood up all the time. You know, they back peak Dixie Jixie era. They were they had the same political view, but they were thankfully the enemy was a little bit funnier.

24:14So they got away with it. Right. And that sort of mirrored a lot of the Gaza stuff over the last year or two where they they stood up early on. Can I read you a headline? Yes, please. The headline is the onion stands with Israel because it seems like you get in less trouble for that. That's from October. Jesus Christ. It's the most cutting media criticism you're really reading. Yeah. And like and by the way, with trans coverage. You've been fairly ahead with guns as well. It was a it is journalism's sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible. This was like in the middle of The New York Times every day, just being like trans kids don't deserve to be alive.

24:58Every single day we read an op-ed that says. and as an aside listeners uh this is a pro-trans podcast if you are anti-trans delete this podcast go fuck yourself anyway just moving on um no i'm with you and the yeah obviously the the mass shooting stuff where um you know the country this happens to yeah there's no way to prevent this as uh only nation where this regularly happens that is an iconic thing that we obviously repost every time there's a major mass shooting which is like every other day and uh like there is nobody else that does this and that's why we wanted this now um it's because when all these other places sort of retreated back into um being really scared to to speak truth to power they're actually they're like no fuck this we're just gonna keep making jokes and we're gonna keep um standing on the side of people who are quite literally sometimes getting murdered for no reason.

25:56Right. And it's interesting. You are tangibly not necessarily, it's not even telling the truth. It's just you're not making any, you're more making statements for comedic effect, but it seems to be more barbed and fresh and focused criticism than actual journalism right now. Why do you think so many journalists are pulling their punches? And I mean everywhere, tech, politics, business. Is it access or is it something else? I think in a lot of cases it's just access Or pleasing their bosses Who really care about access I think a lot of these places With the Trump stuff They decided The bosses decided The number one priority is that you remain on the plane That the campaign will keep talking to you That they will That you're not going to piss them off enough That we're not going to be blackballed or whatever Because the 50-50 journalism is too important I think that's mostly it and I also think like I don't think they understand that I think so many times these people think that they are the bastions of like purity and equality and like one side is this and the other side is this and they cannot be any truth what they're doing is actually really extraordinary not in a good way it's extraordinary in the sense that this didn't actually happen this way previously They have been captured.

27:20They've been captured in a political moment where they they where one side is totally eschewed the concept of the truth. It didn't used to work this way. People used to say that if it was raining outside, they used to say it was raining outside. Now it's right at these networks, whether it's tech or it's politics or anything. Water related weather event. Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, one one side of the government insists it is not raining. right um and that's like that that is that's new like that's a new kind of reportage in the sense that it sucks previously that didn't happen um don't let anybody tell you otherwise yeah and it's interesting it's almost like one side right wing side is very aggressively just objective just they don't give a shit like they can do do and say what they want and then you get towards the centristy and i hate these terms because i feel like it's very hard to actually describe what's going on with them.

28:15But the center left, but let's be honest, it's more center than anything. They seem to perceive objectivity, sorry, subjectivity, or sorry, objectivity, Jesus Christ, I swear I speak English, as something that requires you to humor every argument, that every position is actually fair. Also, I don't think objectivity exists, and it's very bizarre to watch this. It's something I find with tech as well, very frustrating. But it's interesting that I think that The Onion is actually doing some of the best journalism, but through the most bizarre path there. Yeah, there's like there's this kid on TikTok.

28:53It was like 90 ,000 views. And she's just like, I'm she said in a very Gen Z way. She's like, I say this with my whole chest. Like The Onion has had better has had better coverage over the last month and on Israel and Gaza than The New York Times and Washington Post. And like she reads through it and you couldn't you can't argue with it. Like they just it's just the truth. I completely I completely agree with you on this, man. Like there is like getting there. There is a kind of thing that's going on where journalism is now insistent on you just getting punched in the face all day by fascists.

29:29Yeah. OK, fine. I don't think they punch us. Yeah, exactly. It's very it's very important to find out why they punched us. While like the actual concept of what's going on is completely different. I was on like a, you know, I was doing an interview a couple days ago and there was this whole I was they were having this whole conversation that arranged in so many different ways about disinformation and like a guy, a story a guy wrote in Harper's about the concept of disinformation and how that is affected by Jim Jordan. But it's also affected by the fact that Katie Couric gave a speech about something.

30:02I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. What is who gives a shit? But like if you the beauty of this place, beauty of the onion, is it like you can just cut right through the middle of that. Like these people can be having this stupid ass conversation on each side of it. And you can just be like, nope, just sliding on through. And that that to me is that's valuable. And that's that to me is good reportage. That is just ignoring the fucking noise and trying to get to the center of what's actually going on. do you consider it a comedy outlet or a journalism outlet i mean it's both i mean our bread and butter is stupid jokes like our right of course dumbass like i was thinking about a gorilla mother making the gorilla slouch that's one of my favorite recent one yeah exactly like like uh yelling at her child for not to slouch more like that's amazing like for example like i was i was reading a really old issue out here our entire archives and um i was just plowing through it and there was a very serious iraq war issue where they were talking about you know george w bush's timeline to leave or whatever uh and it was everything was very heavy but on the top left the very first story you see on there it's a nabisco discontinues wheat fix

31:25that's great that's the thing there's you really get just like people having a bit of fun with that it feels like journalism and media in general has got so goddamn serious yeah but but also serious in a way that doesn't seem to have the appropriate seriousness for like police brutality fascism but it's just serious about everything else you're that's i think that's why um like the working like they're a substantial swath of the working class in america listens to joe robin other than the fact that's like very hypnotic and like it's something on in the background is because even they think they're getting the news which is wrong right do you think that but in between that is him like showing you know videos of gorillas and like people punching each other in the face and you know there is like there is a mild like through line of joy that goes on there that cannot happen on the regular news it just doesn't right it doesn't happen and like like there was there used to be some of that in like the today show if people still watch that i don't really know but like yeah there's a lot but that's very forced fun like fake fun.

32:32You can't you can't seed fun to fascism. Like you can't see the like the concept of making dick jokes to fascism because if you do, it's just going to win. It's just like they're just going to get every teenager in America, even if even if they're sitting around being like, these ideas are fucking stupid. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, this is horrible. The way we're treating people is bad. But like, you have to have some sense of humor about stuff or it's uh what's the point of being alive also feels like the very dry objective standard of cnn nbc nbc's done more opinion stuff which i appreciate but even then there's only a little bit of it of the the larger media space just feels very serious and then there's the right wing psychos but if you look at what the right wing's doing it is fox and friends is a complete joke it's an insane show i'm sure if you watch it for more than an hour it begins to like melt your brain but it's fun in a horrifying way like it's trying to make the fascists watching okay i'm sure there are some non-fascists who watch fox news i'm sure there's one of them anyway um but nevertheless it's dorky it's weird and then everything else outside of the fascist sphere is just dry dry as a bone every so no wonder people are going to the joe rogan's of the world because it's not like they can open a newspaper or a magazine these days in the magazine or the newspaper actually speaks directly to them it doesn't feel like at times it's even written as anything else other than a log of what happened and it's so hard for modern journalism to escape that i just i don't know i i worry but also i guess it benefits me that a lot of journalism is going to move opinion side and that's assuming that trump doesn't get in and just shut down journalism in general but that's another problem right no i mean i think that like uh i like i said with the kids i don't think they're getting traditional news i think they use traditional news as like uh in the way that we used to send people a pdf to research or something right that's how they use it they're like i swear to god this is real just click on this thing i can prove it that's how they they use it as like a i swear this is proof but they don't like read it or ingest it every day and they really don't sit down and watch television news because again why would they they're just being excoriated for being alive and that's yeah like it's not useful i i think that there is i think both parties are abandoning the premise that um there should be joy in your life um from various different angles right i don't know like the the american right uh the trump right is a very joyless vector it's like very like you must support this man or beautiful you must aspire to a traditional life i think that's like that's really humorless right um and i'm not saying like the left has an equivalent like i hate when people do that but like there is like it's just because it's so scary right having to like it's hard we're out of making jokes about donald trump we've had it didn't work and like it's 10 years later it just it never tell you during the trial them showing him the tweets everyone else found that really funny it made me very sad because i don't want people to think that this will happen to them i don't want them to think that trump is going to see their tweets he never will wait please stop keep going sorry no so it is important to have you know there must be wheat thicks that's what i'm saying great what the fuck is the point you have to like get you have to get people into this it's why the new york times is still doing well it's because they have wordle just yeah and they and they have some opinion columnists that are readable and then many others that aren't and it's very strange it that's what i really don't understand you've got all these esteemed outlets that have become kind of homogenous yeah like what is the like the new york times wall street wall street journal is the more businessy one new york times has business coverage chicago tribune is in chicago there are the occasional people out there at boston globe but they still got here, Martha Bray doing tech.

36:42Like you've still got some voices, but it's almost like they've drained them of life. Like there aren't people with names. There was this big, like, um, first of all, that all the digital places have died or have been eaten. Right. So like Buzzfeed died. They had awesome reportage. Amazing stuff. Anything that was like human focused, empathy based journalism is basically gone. It went to like nonprofit work. So it went to like, the ProPublica's of the world or whatever. And those have much longer timelines and their focus isn't really impact. Their focus is like, let's get awards. Let's get, you know, let's get a big long story that's really comprehensive out there.