[Archive 2007-11-25] The Onion: An interview with 'America's Finest News Source'

Historical archive — originally published 2007-11-25. This report records what was known on that date. It is not current news; subsequent events may have changed the situation. Wikinews closed in May 2026.

Long before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Heck and Johnson envisioned a publication that would parody the news—and news reporting—when they were students at UW in 1988. Since its inception, The Onion has become a veritable news parody empire, with a print edition, a website that drew 5,000,000 unique visitors in the month of October, personal ads, a 24 hour news network, podcasts, and a recently launched world atlas called Our Dumb World. Al Gore and General Tommy Franks casually rattle off their favorite headlines (Gore's was when The Onion reported he and Tipper were having the best sex of their lives after his 2000 Electoral College defeat). Many of their writers have gone on to wield great influence on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's news parody shows.

And we are sorry to break the news to all you amateur headline writers: your submissions do not even get read.

Below is David Shankbone's interview with Chet Clem and Sean Mills about the news empire that has become The Onion.

Chet Clem, Editorial Manager: We do everything backwards here. We start with the headline and then flesh out the story, as opposed to The New York Times, which writes the issue and then has a headline editor to make it snappy. We start with a joke. We read about six hundred to eight hundred headline ideas on a Monday coming from our staff and a small group of writers outside—a contributing core. We whittle that down on a Monday to about a hundred, come in Tuesday and pick an issue and brainstorm with the whole editorial staff; all fifteen of us. Then we assign a headline to a specific writer to execute. We go through a number of drafts and then have the editors pick it up and assign the photojournalism aspect of it to our graphic design team, who adds the visual aspect to it. The editors punch it up over the last couple of days and then it goes out over the Internet and into the print edition.

DS: So you don’t have writers coming up with a story and headline, but you will instead have a team of writers choosing the best headlines and then assign it to a particular writer who was not necessarily involved?

Chet: Writers will occasionally write their own headlines, but we come up with a list of 15 or 20 headline ideas, what we think will make a good story and then we assign it based upon what people’s writing strengths are. We have some people who are great at politics; some people we give all the war stuff to; someone who is in charge of the Britney Spears story of the week—the entertainment stories.

DS: It seems like some publications, like AM New York, always have a Britney Spears story; is there anything similar with The Onion where they continually revisit a topic or person?

Chet: No, not necessarily. We are a little less reactionary. We tend to target the zeitgeist more than anything. We’ll hit the mainstream media’s portrayal of the entertainment world as much as we’ll hit characters in the entertainment world. We’ll attack People Magazine’s coverage of Britney as much as Britney.

DS: In an interview with Terry Gross, Stephen Colbert said of his time at Second City that they had decided on not doing political humor and, in particular, hackneyed political humor such as Ted Kennedy drinking jokes. They felt it was overdone, mean-spirited and not funny. Do your writers have similar rules of thumb?

Chet: We don’t have any rules or known lines we won’t cross. We have an understanding based upon having the same writers in the back room for years, and those writers training the new writers as they come in. There is an understanding in the room. If it makes the room laugh, it probably ends up in the paper. One example is we ran an article a couple of years back that was, “No Jennifer Lopez News Today.” That was our reaction to all of the J-Lo stuff. We weren’t going to touch on her dress, or who she was dating. Just the fact that those were the lead stories for so many days, in everything from US Weekly to Time Magazine.

Source and licence

Text adapted from The Onion: An interview with 'America's Finest News Source' by Wikinews contributors under CC BY 2.5. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. Contributor history.