The Onion

Every week, three million readers turn to the world's most popular humor publication for a much-needed dose of Onion satire and entertainment coverage. In a history spanning 15 years, six popular books, and 10 Webby Awards, the Onion has attracted legions of loyal fans drawn to its scathingly funny commentary on world events, human behavior, and journalistic convention. Onion, Inc. serves as the holding company for a number of ventures that developed out of the popularity of the satirical newspaper the Onion. The print edition of the newspaper is distributed in Madison, Wisconsin; Boulder and Denver, Colorado; Chicago; New York City; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. The electronic edition of the newspaper is updated every Wednesday on the company's web site, www.onion.com, which also sells merchandise and a series of best-selling books produced by the company. Onion, Inc. also broadcasts on the radio through the Onion Radio Network, syndicated by Westwood One. Approximately 320,000 copies of the Onion are distributed each week. The company's web site averages 3.6 million unique visitors and more than 30 million page views each month. From its start, the Onion offered its satirical perspective on events surrounding it, picking its birthplace as its first subject. The print edition of the Onion , the first of a handful of media that generated revenue for Onion, Inc., was started by two University of Wisconsin students, Tim Keck and Chris Johnson. In 1988, the pair, with the help of fellow students, printed the first edition of the Onion on notebook-sized paper and distributed it for free, offering their mocking view of campus life and the college town supporting it. Advertising in the newspaper consisted of coupons for the two staples of student life: draft beer and pizza. One year after its debut, the "newspaper," improbably, was acquired. "A bunch of college kids in Madison, Wisconsin, were putting out copies of what they thought was good satirical humor," the publisher of the Onion remembered in an October 23, 2002 interview with ContentBiz . "It was good enough that entrepreneur Scott Dikkers bought it from them to run as a formal publishing company. I'm not sure what the amount of the sale was, but I'm sure it wasn't much." The intervention of Dikkers, whose financial resources were not revealed, did not lead to an immediate transformation of the Onion into a "formal publishing company." Dikkers's goal of having the Onion delivered to doorstops nationwide alongside issues of the New York Times was, like the Onion itself, tongue-in-cheek. The printed tabloid did develop, however, a small but loyal following, as Dikkers, with the help of Peter Haise, a 1990 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, developed a brand of topical, parodying humor, that proved to be exportable to markets outside Madison. In 1994, the Milwaukee edition of the printed tabloid debuted, distributed, like the Madison version, for free. The most important achievement during this early period in the Onion 's development, one only known to the enclaves of readership in Madison and Milwaukee, was the quality of work produced by Dikkers, Haise, and several other writers. The writing was humorous and well received, attracting a cult-like following that would find acceptance from a much larger audience not long after the expansion into Milwaukee. The catalyst for this transformation--the development from a cultish print tabloid into a publication known nationwide--was the emergence of the Internet. The Onion was just the type of entity to benefit from the public's embrace of the Internet. Dikkers and Haise could never realistically hope to distribute the Onion nationwide alongside copies of the New York Times , but they potentially could reach the same readership base electronically through the Internet. The two editors launched their web site in 1996, producing an electronic version of the Onion at the address www.theonion .com (rights to www.onion.c