BIG INTV: The Onion's Ben Collins On How The Truth Can Pay Dividends

0:01Welcome to Wired's Big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond. A good Onion story needs no setup. Ben Collins is the CEO of The Onion, which has come a long way from its early days as a campus weekly at the University of Wisconsin. Then came books, podcasts, a news network, and even a direct-to-video film. The Onion has also traded hands more than once and been stymied by layoffs, mediocre executives, and bad business models along the way. But everything old is new again. When Ben Collins took the job last year, he said the words no one thought we would ever hear. Let's print a newspaper.

0:40Hi, Ben. Thank you for joining. Hey, thanks for having me. And speaking of Onion Headlines, Ben, while I have you, do you have a recent favorite? What stands out? What's been good lately? I mean, I have so many. The Galene Maxwell blood splatter one. Can I look it up for you? Please do. Read it to us. Hold on. Ghislaine Maxwell can't help but notice interview room covered in plastic sheet. I think it's perfect. Kind of like explains the whole situation that we're about to see ourselves in, which is potentially horrific. But yeah, no, they turn out like 15 a day that are great. Seriously, I sit there and I still don't know how they do it.

1:15When I say they throw away eight or nine of the best sentences I would ever write every day, I mean that sincerely. Like they are just prolific and incredible comedy writers. Well, speaking of sentences, Ben, we are going to start with a little warm up. We're going to get our muscles warm, our brains warm. I'm going to ask you some very fast sentences, some quick questions, and you're going to answer them quickly. Are you ready? Let's go. Let's do it. Ben, what does the algorithm know about you? Oh, way too much. A lot of wrong stuff. I wish my net worth is what the algorithm said it was. Okay, making a note to look up Ben's net worth after we finish this taping.

1:53What is a piece of tech you wish existed but doesn't exist yet? Oh, I've ever seen the movie It Follows? Absolutely not, but tell us about it anyway. Oh, it's a horror movie that's supposed to be set in no specific time frame. But there is a phone they have in there that's like a, it's literally like a clamshell. And it's an e-reader. It's like the pace of tech that I want it to be. Everyone look it up. It's great. There is a disinformation reporter named Jane Lipinenko who says that, you know, the sharks in the Atlantic Ocean should eat all the cables. underneath the Atlantic Ocean that connect the internet.

2:24That's the piece of technology that I want. I want a shark that... That eats the internet. That turns it all off. Yeah. At this point, we may as well. Maybe after this podcast is a big success. What app are you ashamed to love? Oh, Bellagio. Bellagio was the answer. What is that? Oh, you don't know Bellagio? No. Oh, my God. It's a game made by a guy who didn't know he was inventing a thing that could make time go too fast. It's like poker with incentives, but I don't even like poker. And it won't like indie game of the year and all this stuff. So last, I guess it was last July, I was in the middle of taking over the onion and moving and all these things.

3:04And somebody told me to download Bellatro. So I downloaded Bellatro and I was about to get in the shower and the shower was on. And I downloaded it and I started playing Bellatro. And I looked up and it was like two hours later and the shower was still on. So I was like, I should turn the shower off. So I turned the shower off, kept playing the game. My phone was in the other room. Two more hours go by and I go into the other room and my phone is like wall to wall texts. I thought somebody in my family had died or something. And Donald Trump had gotten shot in the ear. No. And everyone thought I had, I don't know, I'm assuming some people thought I had something to do with it.

3:38I was going to say they thought you shot him. You weren't responding. Yeah. So that's Blacho is the answer. Yeah. Okay. Who or what is your hate follow? Great question. And I try not to do it anymore because it makes me too sad. Oh, it used to be that guy Nick Adams, but now he's the ambassador to Malaysia. That seems to be how things are going in Trump's America. Yes. All of your hate follows are now in very senior level positions somehow attached to the administration. There we go. All right, Ben. Time for some real questions. So you became the CEO of The Onion in April 2024. It's kind of hard to believe it has only been a little over a year.

4:19You've accomplished a lot in a little over a year. How do you rate the job out of 10? What's the best part? What's been the hardest part of this year plus of your life? I'm going to be that guy who's like, the staff deserves a 10 and I deserve a four. But I really, that's kind of what it is. I just did obvious stuff, right? I came back to a place that's known for its fake newspaper. And I brought back the fake newspaper. And we really hustled to make that happen. That was a staff level thing. at just gave deadlines that were impossible to achieve and they pulled it off so like i will say on a scale of one to ten i'm very mid as a human being on all levels but my midness like kind of i think allowed me to see what i think what most people think the onion is and should be and i just i i was allowed to pull it off so like that's what we did you know it's been like you said was March of or sorry, April of last year.

5:14We went in. The website was just absolutely bombarded with gross like dick pill ads. And we just didn't want that anymore. How much money were dick pill ads bringing in for the onion? I mean, how much even if you can't share numbers like what what amount of revenue did that account for? It's about 70 percent of revenue. No. And I know. Well, that's what I mean, that's what private equity does. And I like I get it. I see it from this side where, you know, there's a level of precarity not having basically a slot machining operating in the background. Yeah, yeah. But that's what it is, right? The dick bill ads are about 70 percent of revenue and they're probably like a couple million dollars a year maximum.

5:55But the entire page was that. And it detracted from the comedy as attracted from the incentives for the jokes. Like they were making slideshows all day. They were doing one off jokes. They weren't leaning into the things they did best. So we just turned that off and we're like, we're just not going to make money for a month. Like we're, we have this initial infusion of money to be able to pull this off. So it's not a lot, but we think we can survive until we get this paper moving. And then there was this kismet where the DNC was happening in Chicago. So the entire political press and the entire world was focused on Chicago, even more so since there was just a brand new nominee and all these things were happening.

6:29So we're like, we're going to relaunch then. And we had to figure out everything. We had to, you know, you would call it building a stack, but really, really, we had to invent into business. We had to figure out a way to print newspapers in 2024. I was actually going to ask you about the logistical complexities of actually restarting a newspaper in the year 2024. Well, I think a big part of it for us is that we were just, we're so naive that we didn't know that there were middlemen that could accomplish this for us. So we just like build it ourselves, right? We went directly to, there's a place by O 'Hare called Top Web that just prints newspapers.

7:05So we just went there. And you were like, will you please print our newspaper? Yeah, they make like, you know, those like they print like Spanish language dailies and like those like coupon books, basically. They print all those sorts of things. And they had just bought at a huge discount from like Switzerland or something, this gigantic old fashioned newspaper making machine, which was big and like the scale that we needed. So we got kind of lucky there. And then we were like, so we also need a new website for this because this old website, we have to get off of the previous CMS, which is called Kinja, which is part of the Docker network.

7:40Oh, I know all about Kinja. You know, that's a whole thing. You guys can look that up too. So we moved that over. And then, you know, we knew these folks who knew how to make newspapers called MG Strategy and Design. They're just old fashioned newspaper people who have really adapted correctly to like what the web does for journalism. So we got all into that. And then, you know, within three or four months, we're probably gonna be able to do this. It was a real harried, frenzied thing. But we launched a website and a newspaper in the marketing around that newspaper and all that stuff between basically the last week of April and the first week of August.

8:18So it was just it was a rush, but it was worth it. Which is, as someone who has worked at a lot of media companies, and I know you have too, and I now work at a very large media company, that doesn't happen. Like, that is not a normal timeline to overhaul not only the business model of this title, but sort of all of the distribution mechanisms at the same time, right? Like, revamping, launching a new website, print product, the whole thing. No more dick ads, whatever dick pill situation was going on that you were making millions of dollars from. I mean, that is a massive overhaul. I'm curious because from the outside looking in, you project and you seem like the kind of CEO whose employees would just be like, goddamn, like this guy rules.

8:59Like you are doing a lot of things that I think so many people in newsrooms, whether fact-based or satire-based, really look at with a lot of admiration. What makes you hard to work for? What are the things that drive your staff crazy about you? So the same things that make me good at this make me bad at it. I had that psychotic news brain where I'm just like, we've got to get this done in like two months or it's over. Right. Right. Like we're working on a project that that will be out next month that is one of the more ambitious things that we've ever done. And I was like, it's got to be done by the end of August.

9:33And I think that makes me that they should throw stuff at me. They should like pick up hammers and throw them at my head. Like they should absolutely do that. Right. So that does that is a huge problem. When you think about everything that you've done and everything that you still hope to do, which I want to ask you about in a little bit, you relaunched the physical newspaper. You have a paid membership program. You overhauled your advertising strategy. You got video back up and running. When you think about all those sort of smaller things, although I would say they're all quite significant in their own right, what is your sort of overarching strategy for The Onion as a business and as an editorial operation?

10:05Like, how does this all map to one north star, shall we say, if we're having executive speak? Yeah, we think about that all the time. We are in this very unique position, and you guys are too. I think we're symbiotic in this sense, where the incentive structure for the bigger places is to capitulate and get in line, maintain access, don't piss off the administration too much, don't do any of that stuff. We just don't. We're the opposite. And it has helped us dramatically, both as a business and as human beings. We think a lot about how we can provide some truth telling or catharsis right now. We can be silly when nobody else is being fun or like having any having a good time in any capacity, making fun of anything in any capacity because everybody's scared.

10:50I would say since the election, things have changed. Yes. Yeah. I didn't anticipate everybody buckling immediately. Did you? Did you anticipate like all these places just immediately as folded in half? No, no, no, I didn't. And I'm Canadian. So maybe it's some of that. Maybe I'm naive. No, I remember in February, and I say this to our staff and anyone who asks all the time, when we started doing the reporting that Wired was doing then and that we're still doing around Doge and the administration, I remember sort of looking around after like a week and being like, wait, like, did I miss an EIC memo?

11:22Like, did something go out that I wasn't on? Are we doing something wrong? Like, why isn't anyone else covering this? This is really weird. And it picked up, obviously, right? Like the coverage picked up, but it certainly felt like a pretty lonely place to be for a minute and a pretty sort of precarious place from a security standpoint that nobody else was like jumping in full-throated, like guns blazing, let's go. whereas at Wired we were like no let's go like this is the time this is the time and I think exactly as what I've seen from The Onion is you've had this sort of groundswell of support right from your audience from people who are like-minded who understand fact from fiction and sort of live in our version of reality which I would argue is the actual reality of what's happening in this country who have really shown up to support you guys and I think we saw the same thing like it has been good for business to do good journalism and tell the truth it's great for business and also it you're a nerds to all these other pressures right like advertisers do come to us to be a part of this they might not scream it from the rooftops but they do like that's where the the audience is not with like you know fascists with tiny mustaches and like like doughboy you know the guys no yeah yeah i know that's not where like the that's like Like that's where big billionaire money is because those are that's where they want everything culturally to align.

12:48Right. But it's not where actually people are. People don't like this shit. People are very much against this. I will say, and you're probably going to bring this up later, but like we have a window into this like immediately because the election happened. And then eight days later, the auction for Infowars happened. Right. Right. And we it became immediately clear to us that no one else was going to bid on this. So, like, for people who don't understand what I'm saying. Back us up here a little bit. Sure. InfoWars was for sale at an auction because Alex Jones was successfully sued for a billion dollars by two sets of families, one in Texas, one in Connecticut, that he had libeled for saying that Sandy Hook was completely synthetic and didn't actually happen.

13:36So just by, I would say, really poor timing, eight days later, the auction for these assets, like the entirety of the Infowars thing, like including his supplements that he sells to people, were for sale. And we were going to put in a bid beforehand. And we were like, absolutely. And then it became clear, like the way people were talking about it, that there was no appetite to actually bid for this. Like our chances for getting this went from maybe to it's you or him. And he had like his own shell company situation thing that is technically operated by somebody else. But we'll just reinstall him later.

14:16And we had to make a decision like we are by bidding on this. We're inheriting a permanent harassment campaign and all this stuff. And no one knew where the wind was blowing. Even in the week afterwards, you could see everyone was just like, I guess I better just batten up fucking the hatches. We really can't board up the doors and get afraid of fascism for four years. We had to take a risk to do that. Like, we won. The judge took it away from us because he was also scared of what was going on. And I don't blame him. By the way, we're still working on this. We're still trying to find a way to get it.

14:45We'll see what happens. I don't know. Yeah, no, I mean, that was my question. So I'll just ask it now. I mean, you made this bid. It was an incredible moment when it was announced that you were doing this. And then all of a sudden, breaks are on, right? And a judge somewhere, I don't have all the details, but basically said, this isn't happening. Yeah. He basically wiped away about like 18 months of court decisions was like he just I mean, I would be spooked, too. You got to remember, like, you know, Dan Bongino, Cash Patel, these people are we're on InfoQuest. Yes. Yes. Yes. So like Dan Bongino, like he got to start there.

15:17Like these people, that was a feeder system to the administration. So like to be afraid of that is natural in general. But it shows also that for us, putting your foot in the ground as a business, as a human being is important right now. This is not time sensitive. You could start right now. Now, we've maintained a business because people trust that we're making fun of criminals. There's a satisfaction in it. Yes. I mean, absolutely. I mean, so just to be clear, you are still working on acquiring those supplements. This is important for me. I need to know where to put my next order in. So that's still.

15:56Okay. Yeah. Yes. I mean, if we end up with the supplements, I still don't know what to do with them. But we are absolutely trying to. We have a whole plan for what to do with InfoWars if and when we get it. Well, you know what? But I interviewed Brian Johnson. It came out last week. And, you know, he has a supplements business. So maybe he could take that off your hands. Oh, yeah. We're very similar people. There, yeah, you and Brian. No big deal. But talking about sort of InfoWars, I mean, this is sort of like a murky universe that you are uniquely familiar with, right? You were a reporter. You covered disinformation.

16:25So you are sort of very well steeped in how the internet became the cesspool of conspiracy and bad faith and artificial information, like all of that nasty stuff. You know that very, very well. How has that sort of shaped the way you think about the onions role in media, the onions role on the Internet, sort of the onions role, maybe not as a purveyor of truth because you don't exactly traffic in truth, but as a purveyor of something sort of good amidst all of that muck? Well, I think we all saw anybody who covered this stuff saw the web degrade and the free flow of information degrade as billionaires and bad guys slowly took over the Internet.

17:07That's what happened. There were some real accelerant moments, even on buying Twitter was probably the biggest one of all. The growth and protection, I would say, of extremist spaces by the congressional GOP, I would say during the Biden administration, by calling the concept of being able to track where information comes from censorship. So I saw it all happen. And that's when we bought the onion. The reason I was in such a rush to buy the onion is because I want to protect this one thing. The onion was my favorite thing growing up, period. Like it was my favorite outlet. It alerted me to really stupid jokes, nefarious behavior, but also I would say humanist politics.

17:52So you were a print onion reader, like as a little as mini Ben. It's Mini Ben, yeah. I mean, I lived in the woods, and then every time I got to go into a city, every time I got to go into Boston, I would come home with, like, a stack of onions. Because, like, that's... It was your thing. Yeah, I mean, that was... Anytime you got to see the movies, it felt like a miracle that there were free onions in the saddle of the road. So it allowed me... It gave me a permission structure to think critically about the world. When I saw it was for sale, and I knew that it could end up in, like, really bad hands...

18:23Like, I did. I went zero to 60. I just kind of like I did everything I could to save this thing because I don't know where it'd be right now if it was in somebody else's hands. It'd probably be like weird AI headlines and they'd probably fire all the staff and all this bullshit. I just didn't want that to be the case. And to be able to take this thing and just basically maintain what it is and have that rise so far above everything else is the point, basically.

18:54The economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.

19:28You went from reporter to not just manager, but like to CEO. And I remember, I think this was, what, this is 2022. You really went through it with NBC, your previous employer. Not going to ask you to speak ill of the dead. But you, I think, essentially said like you were quitting journalism, like you were kind of done with this whole thing. The onion was strong enough to pull you back. Like what got you back in the game in the way that because you came back in the game in a pretty big way. You're the CEO of a media company now. Yeah, this is a once in a lifetime thing that I am so I'm just blessed to have been able to pull off.

20:03And what I saw happening in traditional journalism is not happening in this space, which is overt capitulation, trying not to piss off the very rich people who have deep seated interests in people's advertising budgets and 401ks and all these other things. I don't know what was going on at NBC. It's not great, as you can tell. I am, God bless them, nice folks that work there. But there was clearly other pressure. I just want to make it clear, like, there's Linda Yaccarino sold all of our ads there. And then I got suspended for being too mean to Elon Musk. And then, like, two and a half months later, she became the CEO of Twitter.

20:47Like, it's not hard to, like, connect dots here. I'm just, it was, it was gross. I just found the whole thing gross. To be real with you, I had a year left in my contract there. And I, I knew with roughly like, you know, 10 months before it that I was not coming back. So I just like, Dave. You went for it. Yeah. Like a very weird thing happened. Like I won this award. I won this Walter Cronkite award, which is so stupid. No, it's a great award. It's a great, no, it's a great award, but it's like, it's very stupid. They gave it to me. So I gave like this whole speech about how you shouldn't capitulate to, like I said, like you know halfway between like what power a powerful person's lie and the truth is you're telling half the truth that's true and i was talking about elon and trump and all that stuff but i knew going into that that was the end of my television career like the second i gave that speech that was a it was over that is like because i i knew that i would be hauled into an office and that happened within three days you were hauled into an office over that yeah i was constantly in the principal's office i ever seen but like that's the thing is like we are allowed to say truer sentences at The Onion.

21:50And my job is to clear a path for that. That's all I do. I try to be just a weed whacker for all the stuff that could get in the way of a powerful person stopping you from saying what you want to say. I want to ask you about your, shall we say, partner in crime. I don't know if you would describe him that way. But The Onion has changed owners, I think, three times. Yeah. So the latest is Jeff Lawson, right? He co-founded Twilio. I'm curious a year in, and he's not going to listen to this so you can say whatever you want. How is Jeff shaping up as an owner? Jeff's amazing. Is Jeff involved? Is Jeff in the mix?

22:24Not on like an editorial level, but on like a, you know, the people who at the leadership team are me, Danielle Sturlay, who used to run products at Tumblr back in the day, back at like peak Tumblr. And then Lila Burlson, who's been all over the place. She worked at TikTok and Netflix, Playboy and all these places. And we run like the business side. But none of us have C-suite experience. We just don't. We don't. He does. He has tons of it. He ran a gigantic, sprawling tech company. And he will just be like, you got to do these things. Like, here are just basic baseline things that you have to do.

23:02Or like, you know, he had a business that became, like I said, sprawling and big. And he'd be like, he'll tell us frequently, like, focus is like very important. If we're experimenting with building a grain silo or something, he's like, you guys run a fucking newspaper. What are you doing? But in terms of editorial direction, he's never touched or written. It'd be hilarious to think about him jumping into that room and just being like, you're going to make fun of like Nvidia now or something. Well, I mean, by today's standards, that makes him sound pretty remarkable. I mean, I think about him and I'm sort of like, OK, we've got Jeff Lawson over here with The Onion.

23:35We've got Bezos at the post. We've got Mark Benioff at Time. I'm curious about sort of your assessment of tech elites, these very wealthy men who made their money in technology. Why become media barons? Why take this on? And what's different in your assessment of sort of Jeff's motives here compared to the other Jeff who is literally dismantling one of the most storied institutions in our country, in this industry, you know, on a daily basis? literally on a daily basis. Yeah. I mean, first, it's a matter of scale. First of all, as you know, the Onion is 500 times bigger than The Washington Post.

24:16Yes. We have 500 ,000 employees across the world. So there's that. He's joking, by the way. It's like a staff of what? What do you got there? 20 people? Yeah, 25 people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But that's one part of it, obviously. But there is something to just buying something and letting it be the great thing that it is that is a statement in itself, I think. Going into something and not ruining it is bravery. I really do think that is, that's what it is. Not going in there and being like, now we're going to focus on woke cancel culture or some shit. You're zagging by just going in there and letting it run.

24:53And like, I'm not saying like, we shouldn't like step on the gas a little bit. We had to do that to bring the paper back. Like finding ways to look forward to the next big splash that we make. But that's all the ideas come from the writer's room. But it's not top down, it's bottom up. I think that's the big difference. Obviously, I think that what is going on at these other places is insane. I think it's a dereliction of duty and candidly devilish and horrific behavior. But I can't stop it. Rich people are going to rich people. We're going to do it. They sure are. Well, it sounds like you found a good rich person, so way to go.

25:28You may have found one of the last good ones. Now, what about money? Do you feel right now pressure to build a profitable business? I mean, is that something that weighs on you? Do you feel like you have runway? What does that look like at The Onion in terms of building something that scales? How much money do you need to make? What kinds of considerations are you thinking about in that context right now? Yeah, like our pitch when we took this over was we just want to make a nice little business. We want to make a business. The whole point of it, I know all this is very against type. Well, no, I mean, the Internet and digital publishing, as we both know, has always been scale for scale's sake.