Nilay Patel at The Verge, in a transcription of his Decoder podcast (Overcast; Apple Podcasts), interviews Ben Collins and Danielle Strle, The Onion’s new CEO and Chief Product Officer:

BC: I was reading Adweek, and I saw The Onion was for sale, and this was around the time where things were just shuttering. Sports Illustrated and Jezebel just shuttered — and it was from the same company, G/O owned Jezebel — or things were being turned into AI slop farms or Elon Musk was buying it. Worst-case scenario.

I posted on Bluesky. I said: “The Onion’s for sale, who wants to help me buy this thing? I have $600.” Leila Brillson, who’s in Chicago where The Onion is based, emailed me, and she was like, “But seriously, how do we do this? It’s an institution. We can’t let this thing die. It’s important to keep this thing alive.” I was like, “Let me just make some phone calls.” The first person I called was Danielle because she just knows.

Two and a half months later, he, Strle, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson own the joint. How is that not an Onion story?

(Except, oddly, there’s not a single mention of Lawson or Twilio on the site. Is their new billionaire owner censoring them?!)

Patel:

There’s a lot going on in this episode, but the one thing I want to call out is just how much fun Ben and Danielle seem to be having. That’s a rare quality in media right now, and it’s infectious. In fact, I’ll just go out and say it because I think you’re going to hear it in the episode: I’m rooting for them to succeed. I have all the same memories of reading The Onion as anyone else, and I hope they figure it out.

I don’t read The Onion regularly, but when I do, it always hits. So deep-seated is the site in our cultural zeitgeist that “Not an Onion Headline” conveys an immediate understanding of quality, and “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” verges on liturgical.