Peeling Back The Onion

Not long ago, Ben Collins was one of NBC News’ most recognizable reporters, covering disinformation and the broader information wars with rare bluntness. Then, in an unexpected move announced last year, he walked away from television to take over as chief executive of The Onion, which he positions as one of the few places in American media still allowed to call out absurdity without flinching.

In our Q&A, Collins explained how The Onion has quietly built a thriving subscriber base by reviving its print edition, leaning into human-written satire, and refusing to soften its voice to appease advertisers or politicians. He also reflected on the limits of corporate news, the impact A.I. is having on journalism, and where his attempt to purchase Alex Jones' Infowars stands today.

Below is our conversation, lightly edited for style.

You went from covering disinformation at NBC News to becoming chief executive of The Onion last year after Global Tetrahedron bought it from G/O Media. How did that career pivot happen and what made you want to run a satire publication?

Oliver! Hello! Good to email with you. The last time I physically saw you, we were talking about trying to de-cable news ourselves, to shed all of the bullshit trappings that come with doing corporate journalism. By the end, every sentence I said on TV ambled down a very narrow avenue that would attempt to provide information while not pissing off certain politicians (really only the far-right ones, specifically Elon Musk), our bosses (afraid of said politicians), and sometimes even advertisers.

(In one of my final acts at NBC News, I was once gently scolded by my very nice boss for calling Panera’s cocainic lemonade “suicide juice.” Deepest apologies to the Panini People.)

So, yes, corporate news is certainly a mind prison and I don’t miss it. The industry worked to basically conceal the truth and hand over power to fascists, who refuse to play word games and live in a sort of injustice antigravity. They’re too busy murdering people with legislation to even look up what the word “semantics” is, let alone care about them.

Anyway, not to turn into a human LinkedIn post, but this contrast is exactly why The Onion is having a bit of a renaissance right now. We have a distinct market advantage at this moment: We’re beholden to no one. While everyone else capitulates to fascism, compromises their values, or otherwise bends the knee, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve remained true to who we are.

The Onion is allowed to say the unsaid sentence that most Americans are thinking but haven’t yet verbalized. We employ arguably the best 15 sentence writers in the country to make that happen.

I’m fortunate to be here at this moment, when we sometimes provide more of a service than the actual news. We’re having a lot of fun, at least until fun is fully criminalized.

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business?

The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday.

The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times.

That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working.

You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step.

If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Where does The Onion stand financially today compared to when Global Tetrahedron took over? Is the publication profitable?

We’re very lucky. We ducked out of the digital programmatic ad game right before the rug was completely pulled out from underneath everyone. Now we’re using this explosive new technology called the “printing press.” It allows you to take posts from Instagram and permanently display them on thin sheets of spruce, fir or pine. We’re gonna be rich, baby!

We had no subscription revenue when we took over in April of last year. We relaunched the newspaper in August of last year. You can almost fill three Madison Square Gardens with our subscriber base now. We ship papers to 50-plus countries and 50 different states every month. It is a miracle and we’re thankful for them. To our Onion subscribers, as Donald Trump once said to Alex Jones: “We will not let you down.” (He really did say that. We live in hell and we drove there on purpose.)

We also have America’s Finest, a creative agency consisting of all-time great Onion writers who simply refuse to move back to Chicago. They’ve been writing ad copy, punch-ups, and awards show jokes all year for some very fancy places. You have probably accidentally seen one of their ads on a billboard or a TikTok video somewhere. But that’s only if it’s funny. If it wasn’t funny, that wasn’t us. That was somebody else.

One of your first big moves was bringing back The Onion’s print edition. Why invest in print when most newsrooms are laser-focused on digital?

People like getting something in the mail that doesn’t make them want to blow their brains out, an exceedingly rare occurrence. They throw Onions on their coffee tables or in the backseat of their Ubers or at the corner of their bar. Increasingly, we hear about kids who steal it and bring it to the cafeteria.

The paper provides a lot of catharsis across generations. It’s physical proof the reader can both read words and can deduce that what’s going on in the world is, in academic terms, fucked up.

From a purely selfish comedy perspective, the jokes are funnier on paper than on social media, where all information is flattened and pummeled to dust. There’s juxtaposition that can’t exist on the web. (This month has an article titled “C’mon, Everybody, There’s Too Many Of Us For Them To Stop Us From Jerking Off All At Once!” directly across from the Obituaries section.) We can do visual gags. We can turn the middle of the paper into wrapping paper. We can make outsider art at a time when that is increasingly against the law.

And, again, people like supporting us because we’re one of the rare spaces in American life with a modicum of influence and history that simply refuses to kiss the ring. We bought a full-page ad in The New York Times to taunt Congress. We had the top trending video on all of YouTube on Election Day, directly above Beyoncé.

We quite literally couldn’t have done any of this without our members and I am infinitely grateful to them for it. They make all of this possible and they get a newspaper in the mail once a month that’s about to get even bigger and better starting this month.

You tried to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars, only for a judge to block the sale. Is there still a path for The Onion to acquire it, or is that dead for good?

We’re working on it.

You've been outspoken about how toxic Elon Musk has made X, yet you're still occasionally posting on there. I must ask: Why feed his machine?

Well shit, it does look like I’ve posted there a half-dozen times this year. I was on ketamine at the time and it won’t happen again.

While we’re on this topic, I would like to make clear how unbelievably useless Twitter is to us as a subscription driver, or really any other part of our business. If we left tomorrow, nothing would materially change. We have over 11 million “followers” on there, but it’s clear they left, died or worse. Twitter is Exhibit A for Dead Internet Theory. YouTube, Bluesky, TikTok and Instagram are where both money and influence is made now, and that is accurately reflected in our subs and traffic numbers.

You’ve insisted The Onion will never use A.I. to generate jokes, emphasizing human writers. Is there any role for A.I. in satire, or do you believe it's just inherently unfunny?

A.I. is inherently a mediocrity machine. It takes the precise middle of everything and attempts to emulate it. That’s A.I. when it’s working, and it’s great for, like, TurboTax. That’s also satire when it’s total dogshit.

The only times I’ve seen A.I. being funny are when it messes up profoundly. A full ten years before its rebrand into some sort of all-encompassing economic panacea, we used to call generative A.I. bots LLMs. One of them was called Horse_Ebooks, and it was hooked up to a Twitter account that tweeted random sentence fragments from smutty books about horses. Everyone assumed it was a robot gone haywire. Its best work wound up being sentences hand-curated by a human in disguise.

In short, A.I. has done a tremendous job of laying off roughly 10% of my friends and driving down the quality of the open internet, covering it with a layer of lorem ipsum. It’s done a bad job of making pretty much anything that can escape the uncanny valley artistically, despite being three years into this hype cycle about how it’s going to gain sentience and kill America’s grandmas. All of this is being pitched as good for the economy, for some reason. Anyway, I’m sure Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg have our best interests in mind and this will be a net-positive for society.

In recent years, some top comedians have said "woke" culture is killing comedy. I assume you don't agree. How do you see it?

“Woke culture is killing comedy” is an incredibly profitable sentence. I just wrote that sentence six seconds ago and Jeff Bezos showed up at my door to offer me a $2 million comedy special on Amazon Prime. Which, as of this sentence, is a great streaming service and company. Woke culture bad now! The problem is poor people! Gotta go count my money now. Bye bye!

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