The Onion turned back to print. It brought in over 50,000 new subscribers

It might sound like a joke in today’s digital-first world, but the satirical news outlet The Onion made the leap back to print a year ago.

It’s paying off: alongside its active website, the print publication now boasts more than 53,000 subscribers.

The Onion, known for its sharp takes on current events, originally launched as a campus weekly on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisc. It halted its print edition in 2013 and went fully digital.

But in August 2024, under new ownership, The Onion announced the return of a monthly print edition, delivered by mail to subscribers.

Jordan LaFlure, The Onion’s executive editor, spoke with As It Happens host Nil Köksal about the “rather unexpected scenario” they’ve found themselves in — and what their experience might reveal about the future of media.

It sounds like you and the team are surprised that you’re here a year later.

Yeah, I won’t bore you with the details. I’d rather focus on the present and future, but my staff and I have extricated ourselves from a former ownership that was not giving us very positive feelings.

We’re in an ascendant place that just a year and a half ago was very unexpected.

What have the new owners said and done to get you to this place?

I mean, really what they’ve done is just empower us, not to take too much credit away, or for me and the team, but I feel like what we’ve done in the past year or so is to execute a vision that we’ve long had: a return to print, a de-emphasis on old business models that simply don’t work, and by that, I mean an overdependence on banner ads on websites.

I’m happy to continue powering theonion.com, it’s an important place for us as a brand, but to depend wholly on a website to generate the revenue necessary to support us and the brand writ large was outdated thinking.

The new leaders have done an excellent job of surveying the current media landscape, recognizing that we needed to generate revenue directly from our readers rather than depending on a website.

Long story short, it’s working. We couldn’t be happier about it.

Who are your subscribers?

We skew a little male. I believe our single largest cohort from an age demographic standpoint is 35 to 44.

Anecdotally, I’ve also come to understand that younger folks are enjoying reading us in print as well.

What else is different apart from it coming out once a month in the print edition?

First I would just emphasize that the experience of consuming The Onion just improves a lot when the context is The Onion itself.

By that, I mean as opposed to within the social media context. I’m proud of the work we do, I am proud of each and every joke we publish — for the most part — and the experience with consuming it on social media just pales in comparison.

We have a lot of jokes that benefit from adjacency to other jokes. It provides a contrast that in and of itself can be amusing. To have this closed space, a closed room to enjoy The Onion is just a much better way to consume it.

You know better than most that tumultuous times, difficult times even, are certainly fertile ground for the kind of work that you and your team do in satire. What is this particular moment, not just in the U.S., but around the world like for you and the team? Is it easier or more difficult?

First and foremost, I’d like to say that satire is an ancient art and these unsettled times that we live in, unfortunately, are not all that unique.

There are unique components to it, of course, but these are not the first unsettled, turbulent political times in the history of the world, relative to a satire’s ability to comment on it.

The tools of satire are robust, they’re consistent, and so we just simply continue to use them regardless of the era that we live in.

That’s the confident answer. The second layer of truth I can offer is that it is in fact hard to satirize a government, a person, a man who conducts themselves in such a heightened way [and] manner.

I think it makes it incumbent upon us to comment on the cast of characters around him. I’m alluding to [U.S. President Donald] Trump without saying his name, I’m pretending like he’s Voldemort. Commenting on Trump can be difficult, but we have found ways to do it by commenting on the people around him.

Last year, The Economist wrote, “For a publication devoted to teasing newspapers, returning to paper is the ultimate troll. If The Onion succeeds, the joke will be on everyone else fleeing the format.”

Do you feel like it’s the ultimate troll?

I suppose it is. I had not thought of it in those terms, and that’s lovely to hear.

The truth of the matter is, while one of the many purposes of our satire is to hold traditional media to account, I will offer that on a personal level, I am in fact rooting for traditional media.

As a consumer of news, I need better journalism. We, to be a functioning society, need access to good, honest, truthful reporting.

I also recognize having worked in traditional media myself that the failure of these organizations to find a business model that better sustains that effort is a problem for all of us.

While it is fun to work for one of the very few ascendant print products, certainly in the United States, but probably also the world, I think it would be a better world for all of us to live in if there were other media brands having the same kind of success.

Do you think they can learn from your model, or is it the kind of content you produce that is what’s drawing people?

That’s a good question. I don’t want to ignore the fact that The Onion is in a unique position, and we have had a lot of stars align for us to get to the place that we are.

I don’t know that every media brand on the planet has equal ability to use print as a way to shore up their financial future.

That said, I do think what they can learn is that if you can be bold, if you can find the resources to attempt new things, it is still in fact possible to gain or regain an audience, even in the year of our lord 2025.