Ha, the fake Onion News Network has hired yet another real TV journalist, Suzanne Sena of Fox News (joke). Laugh now; they could totally get Lou Dobbs, if they tried.


Keith Kelly says the bulk of Time Inc's editorial layoffs could come next week—as many as 90 at the company's biggest magazines, to make up for the non-outpouring of buyout volunteers. So next week should be as sunny as this week, in media land!


A new study "finds that 74% of adults — nearly 171 million — in the United States read a newspaper in print or online during the past week." This is presented as a positive sign for newspapers. Left unsaid is the fact that 68% of those readers were reading "Family Circus."


Popular hero NY1 newsman Pat Kiernan informs us of this breaking trivia-related development:

For almost two years now, fans of World Series of Pop Culture have been asking me "when is the show coming back?" Since VH1 has set its priorities elsewhere, the short term answer is "I don't know." I'll keep trying.

In the meantime, my love of Pop Culture trivia can be suppressed no longer. Each weekday at 11:30 am ET I'll tweet a question at @patkiernan. I'll post it on the website at the same time at www.patspapers.com/trivia

It's tough to run a true trivia competition online because everybody can just Google the answers. But for those who respond with the correct answer I'll award a prize at random from time to time. Mostly it's just about writing some fun questions and creating a place for WSOPC fans to gather.

He tells us this week's prize is a $25 gift certificate and adds, "I'm taking the first 10 responses in the "Comments" section and choosing one at random, hoping to take away the incentive to obsessively press refresh and then google the answer." Don't fuck around with Pat Kiernan's contest rules.


Also in layoff news: We've been updating our AP Layoff List throughout the day, and tips keep coming in. Check it again if you haven't lately, it's long. And we hear BusinessWeek staffers are finding out about their own layoffs right now. Email us with info.

Gene Weingarten's nomination for Worst WaPo Styles Piece of All Time: This thing. "The Light and the Labyrinth." I read it but do not understand it? It has to do with a labyrinth *apparently*. Full analysis in the comments, please. And the conceptually worst Styles story of today is "Rich Kids Like Heroin, Surprisingly."


How is the media in Russia making money, these days? Sexy nude women and bloody murder. They've surpassed us already.


Hey, it is a story about The Onion, in the New York Times. The funny thing about The Onion is how boring its writing process is: "It's a very specific, regimented format...We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don't think there's anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week's headlines." Actually that's the unfunny thing about The Onion.


The most important issue currently facing television viewers: Whether voiceovers in commercials next year will say "Two thousand ten" or "Twenty ten." Or maybe "Two thousand and ten." Regardless, as long as they remember to say "no homo" afterwards they'll be okay.

Onion CEO Steve was not a fan of our early reporting on the Onion's closure of its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions; we don't expect he particularly appreciated our reprinting of a memo in which he told staff they needed to kowtow to advertisers.

Now the paper seems to have tricked us into running not one but two items about rumors it was going to sell. Who knows if their new owner, the Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corp., made a better offer than Comedy Central, but we did laugh at this line: "Experts all agreed that there can be no question of this claim, as this claim is the truth."

A tipster in contact with the company says employees have been told the company will provide them with more information on the purported deal talks on the 20th. As traumatic as an acquisition can be, many on the editorial side would no doubt be relieved to work for a buyer ready to abandon Onion management's recent orders to pander to advertisers in order to stave off further financial losses.

If you know anything else about Monday's meeting, please clue us in.

A tipster says word out out of the publication is that it's in negotiations to sell to a large media company. It's not clear how far apart the two sides are; we're not assuming any deal is imminent.

The Onion has been down this road before. The last business team, led by Peter Haise, bought the paper for a song in 1989 but got whipsawed in 2001 amid the dot-com downturn. There was an abortive effort to sell to Comedy Central before New York money manager David Schafer and his partners took over and installed PR man Steve Hannah as CEO.

Now Hannah, who just cut $6 million in costs, is said to be out seeking buyers. We're guessing he's having an easier time than his predecessor; the Daily Show and Colbert Report rocketed to real prominence in the past eight years, making the satire business more attractive, and the Onion has developed an impressive video operation. The trick is to keep the lights on — without tarnishing the publication's image or integrity — until a deal closes.

If you've heard anything about the talks, let us know (anonymity assured!).

You may recall that the multimedia humor juggernaut killed two of its local print editions in May. The move came amid a "very rough first half of the year," as Hannah puts it in his memo, and a total of $6 million in cost reductions.

Things aren't getting better. The paper laid off five sales people last week; advertising remains scant. Hannah, a former Milwaukee Journal managing editor and PR consultant, writes that the quality of the Onion's writing and videos "is no longer the competitive advantage it once was."

So it's time to cozy up to the money:

Saying "no" to an advertiser whose desires don't exactly match your wishes is a losing game. We either change (and we intend to do it in a smart way) the way we do business, or we don't have a business.



There, I've said it.

We'd insert a joke here about how no one will ever be able to trust fake journalism again, but we know especially well that people do expect some integrity in their entertainment. Bill Hicks was on to something. (And after reading a projecty tweet from an Onion editor, we're guessing some of them feel the same way.)

Memo:

Update: We hear Steve Hannah is, in fact, on vacation until July 15.

So, any promising signs in the advertising market for the media to cling to with wild-eyed hope? Nope. Ad spending overall fell more than 9% in the fourth quarter, which means the decline was gathering speed. On the one hand, we hate ads, but on the other hand, we like getting paid for our work. It's a quandary.


Dreary newspaper industry news roundup: Plunging revenue at Belo and Scripps; the dying Boston Globe goes back to negotiate with its journalists' union this afternoon; two top editors at the Hartford Courant are laid off/ resign in disgust (a little bit of both, I think); and no, the government is not bailing out newspapers, just forget it, -30-.


In his staff memo about the closure of the San Fran and LA print editions of The Onion, CEO Steve Hannah says "I read a bunch of the miscellaneous, blogospheric bullshit that ran on the web last night. As usual, it makes me embarrassed to have spent 18 years as a journalist: the stuff is speculative, stupid, inaccurate, sourced by people who know next to nothing about our company and can't pick up a telephone to call, dumb, irresponsible and, more than a little malicious." But in our case, true! Although we still harbor hopes of one day being called dumb by The Onion.


The biggest issue facing the DC press corps today: whether they are all IN THE TANK because they stand up when Obama comes in the briefing room, but they didn't do that so much when Bush came in the briefing room. 1. Yes they are in the tank. 2. Bush never came in the briefing room anyhow. 3. Ideally the DC press corps would greet all presidents with jeers and invective at all times. Work on that.

Tomorrow's editions of The Onion are said to be the last ones for those markets. Some management will be retained there, as will the just-launched local "Decider" websites, our tipster said.

The Media is Dying earlier today passed along the rumor that The Onion was to "stop printing," implicitly across all editions, an assertion that was smacked down by Hunter Walker of FishbowlNY.

It's true other editions are set to keep going. The Onion, said our spy, will retain its New York paper for the immediate future, though it is rumored to be doing only "marginally" well. Reportedly healthier are papers in Denver and the midwest, a region that has Onion editions in Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul. There are also print editions in Washington, DC and Austin, though it's not clear how those are doing.

(It will, of course, remain possible to buy a print subscription via mail throughout the U.S. -Update)

It was always comforting to imagine that The Onion could avoid the troubles of the broader newspaper industry with the sheer force of its wit — and with its young readers, the sort beloved by advertisers. The satirical paper itself seemed to think so, launching the San Francisco edition in 2005 and the Los Angeles edition in 2006, when deep problems in the newspaper industry were already apparent. (Austin and DC Onions came later; New York launched in 2001; the original print edition in Madison has been around since 1988).

But it would appear the publication is facing the same forces that have whipsawed alternative weeklies, who also bank on young audiences. The alt-weeklies have been stung by everything from the recession to competition from Craigslist, Yelp and Google. The Onion print editions have potentially lower editorial costs than the alt-weeklies, since they all share a great deal of content, but apparently the savings weren't enough to keep the paper afloat in SF and LA.

Hopefully The Onion's popular website and remaining print editions make enough money to keep the publication in business long-term. If the whole enterprise were to ever go under, who would feed staff to the Daily Show? The whole fake news talent pipeline would be horribly broken.

(Image via The Onion)

The arch satirical news outlet ran a funny video on its site early this week, a report (from former CNN anchor Bobbie Batista!) that the Franz Kafka airport alienated its passengers with strange rules and surreal trips into the horrors of the mind. You know, like a Kafka story.

Fallon (or, more likely, someone on his writing staff) apparently just grazed that headline on some blog and wrote a joke that "it must be bad, because the second worst airport is the Hudson River." Har har. It's pretty clear that Fallon wasn't ripping off the Onion's joke because, um, he didn't seem to get it. But still, this is pretty sloppy, even for the puppyish newbie.

[via Dumb as a Blog]

See the clips below.

Onion News Network segment

Fallon clip (starts at 2:17)

Currently it's worth $365, according to eBay. And there are still three days left! For that price you may be the proud winner of this:

I am selling a joke that I can't find a contextual home for. To be fair, it's less of a joke and more of a dated, Capote-esque cocktail party bon mot, but decidedly more feeble. The best one can reasonably expect from this item is a self-satisfied chuckle, such as can be observed issuing from someone wearing a turtleneck while reading the Harper's Index. If that didn't make you barf, please continue reading.

The item in question will be clearly hand-printed on a 3x5 index card and mailed to the winning bidder upon receipt of payment.

Better be pretty fucking funny. At this rate a single issue of the Onion is more valuable than the S&P 500. [Ebay]

Leading a determined push into local markets is HuffPo's new Chicago edition.

And seeding HuffPo Chicago is a scheme whereby the publication takes some — in many cases all — of the content from another site, with a link back to the original.

The result is quick and easy traffic for the new Chicago edition, since the publication ends up catching some Google searches for keywords contained in the (Chicago-related) articles it takes. HuffPo already has good Google PageRank, so its own version of the content floats to the top of the results, even though it was not the original source.

HuffPo's justification, at least when the publication was pulling this crap with us, taking the entirety of our RSS feeds, was that the reprinted posts were good promotion, since they included (a totally buried) backlink to the original content on our site. Please.

The Chicago Reader — which along with The Onion's Decider and Time Out Chicago is being appropriated by HuffPo — isn't having any of this. It published two posts entitled "Grand Theft HuffPo" railing against the tactics:

They're still taking other people's content, in my non-expert but reasonably well-informed opinion well outside the bounds of fair use—so that they can get more pageviews and SEO advantages for themselves by taking the entirety of other people's work. They're taking all of it. Real people—my colleagues—wrote those.

...You want to do a post that says, "According to Jessica Hopper, Bon Iver rules, check 'em out, go here for the info," fine. But taking an entire concert preview is bush league.

HuffPo continues to do this with non-Chicago publications it's been copying from for some time. Like the Times, for example, where it will take the first several paragraphs, adding no commentary, just a link back to the original.

In the wake of the election, HuffPo has a stronger contributors and better brand cachet than probably at any point in its history. It is respect on the national stage. But it only undermines that reputation by continuing to act like a grubby, Google-spamming AdSense scammer when it copies other people's content — while adding no value — like this.

But then self-defeating behavior seems to have been part of the Huffington Post's DNA from the beginning.

Ganz has publicly questioned the campaign for not conducting a more open deliberation over how to sustain the network, which grew and thrived in part on open dialogue and online social networking.

"Is this really what 'building on the movement to elect Barack Obama' is going to look like?" Ganz asked. "I can't believe this was put out by the same people who trained organizers in how to do house meetings in the campaign over the past two years."

Hah, but this is the problem with a huge fake-grassroots campaign based on the extraordinary qualities of an individual and not a cause or ideology! Unless Obama does decide to actually become a dictator or cult leader, it will be more or less impossible to harness the energy of all these millions of kids for any purpose, because none of them agree on what needs to be done beyond electing Obama, which they did. So... why don't they all volunteer for the Humane Society then?

As we said, The Onion covered it:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

Photo: Getty

The A.V. Club story of the Nutraloaf stunt is more entertaining, because it has more unappetizing photos and even a little video! They only got 9 diggs out of it though. They all agreed that it was gross, so this Slate version could've been much more Slate-y if they'd decided it was actually delicious.

Look for Christopher Hitchens to eat some Nutriloaf in a forthcoming Vanity Fair piece, probably. It's fun to pretend!

ONN plays, loud and proud, what you sometimes think you hear in mainstream news. On a typical news day, it’s like an auditory hallucination, that note of contempt, present in phrases like “the human cost” and “area man.” The contempt rings in the booming baritones of spokesmen and anchormen, and in the sneers of correspondents: over-the-top jingoism, xenophobia, snobbism, disgust, dismissiveness.

Who is this relic from the past, touting the virtues of what is clearly nothing more than a new media disaster? Find out after the jump.

Oh yes: it's Virginia Heffernan, 2007 edition. Forgive us our confusion. Sadly, we may have to agree with the 2008 side of this intra-Heffernan conflict:

The depressive, contemptuous voice that works so well in print for the Onion franchise can become suddenly loud and shrill. ONN embodies its misanthropic stereotypes in flesh-and-blood actors, and that means the occasional stab of sympathy can overwhelm the viewer’s willingness to laugh.

While The Onion's mastery of the print form doesn't seem to be dimming, the Onion News Network is so self-congratulatory in its humor that it might as well play with a laugh track.

The genius of The Onion was that it looked like real news. A video podcast doesn't look like real news, not after Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Heffernan's preferred alternative The Colbert Report. The words 'Time Magazine Releases Its Least Influential People List' are best never spoken aloud.

Broadcast Spoofs [NYT]