Passersby will never again be amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
My favorite filler text of all time.
The Onion quits print
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: The Onion quits print
#52As a Canadian who's never seen or even heard of a print edition of the Onion, it blows my mind that they've been around since 1988. I thought they were just a website. Even then I'm surprised the site has been around since '96. Even that's older than I would've expected.
I happened to stubble upon one while I was walking in downtown Toronto. I was just as surprised as anyone.
Re: The Onion quits print
#53The Onion was in print??
It was mainly in the mid west, they used to distribute it in Minneapolis up until like a year ago. It was a free deal that was in most places where you find community papers (Coffee shops, bars, etc.). I really enjoyed getting the new issue every Thursday. It was also cool that the AV Club section had a lot of local content.
Doesn't shock me that they went this route, they had been dropping print cities pretty quickly.
Re: The Onion quits print
#54I never even knew the Onion did print. Hell I never even knew they were alive since what, 1988? Damn, I really thought the Onion was just a small little website with funny articles I saw on Reddit once in awhile, but not a widely known website. Sucks, I'd have loved to read a print version of the Onion.
It started out in print, founded back in the late '80s by a couple of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They were smart and jumped on the web very early (the mid-90s), which helped them build a national audience instead of just a local upper-Midwest one.
I'll toss in my "isn't life weird?" story...
When I was at Madison during that time, I applied at one of the 2 student papers to be a sales rep. I went on to be the Sales Manager for the paper. The guy I won out the job over decided to start the Onion with his friend.
You've never heard of me :-(
----
When they first started, their sales tactic was that the paper was a small tabloid -ize, with the entire bottom 3 inches or so a double-column coupon book. So you just trimmed off the bottom of the weekly issue & went out to the bars/restaurants with it
Re: The Onion quits print
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If humans were still around after being sent back to the stone age (without 100% infrastructure destruction), how long would it take to figure out how to generate enough power to boot a computer? I would hope that there are enough humans who know what electricity is even at a basic level to be able to get some generators running within a couple of years. Even still, there should still be a few power sources left that…
It's not just booting a computer though. Hypothetically, if Silicon Valley is wiped from the planet tomorrow at the same time as a massive EMP killing all electronics on earth simultaneously (extreme), its assumed we could get most of that data back. I'm guessing we'd lose a significant amount of information though. The real loss would be the engineers -- without people manning these systems I'm not sure we're gettin…
That's true. I would assume that we would be able to regain most of the basic "this is what makes us the 21st century" information. Almost everything else, in my mind, would be of questionable value to the new society. If Facebook went dark, if Google went dark, Yahoo, Microsoft, hell even Wikipedia; yeah there'd be significant loss and it would take a long time to recover from. But the benefit of the information age versus the destruction of the Library of Alexandria is that you can't just destroy the Library and all that knowledge is gone. There's a wealth of information and culture on my computer alone. If the biggest sources of knowledge were gone tomorrow, individuals would be able to rebuild the basics of the information age very quickly. We might be set back to 1970, but without the literal decimation of the human population, there's no way we'd be set back to the stone age.
Re: The Onion quits print
#56The worse thing from all of this, is that now we will not have any permanent The Onion records, nor an archive.
Paper beats Silicon.
Re: The Onion quits print
#57I never even knew the Onion did print. Hell I never even knew they were alive since what, 1988? Damn, I really thought the Onion was just a small little website with funny articles I saw on Reddit once in awhile, but not a widely known website. Sucks, I'd have loved to read a print version of the Onion.
I know they at least use to have a few coin operated newspaper vending machines on street corners in Philadelphia. Not sure about elsewhere, I only ever noticed them in Philly.
Are you sure they were coin-op? Everywhere I've ever seen them, they were free. They were definitely in a ... well, I don't know what you call the newspaper distribution boxes, but they were in one (presumably to protect against rain and such), but they were always free to take everywhere I've seen.
Re: The Onion quits print
#58I never even knew the Onion did print. Hell I never even knew they were alive since what, 1988? Damn, I really thought the Onion was just a small little website with funny articles I saw on Reddit once in awhile, but not a widely known website. Sucks, I'd have loved to read a print version of the Onion.
Might be due to locality. I was a fan of the Onion a long time ago, from their website, but it wasn't until I moved away from podunk Memphis, TN and into the DC-area that I ever saw a print copy.
Not surprisingly, they're pretty pervasive (or, I guess were is more correct now) in the DC area, which is somewhat amusing as DC is the target of so much of their humor.
Re: The Onion quits print
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It started out in print, founded back in the late '80s by a couple of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They were smart and jumped on the web very early (the mid-90s), which helped them build a national audience instead of just a local upper-Midwest one.
I'll toss in my "isn't life weird?" story... When I was at Madison during that time, I applied at one of the 2 student papers to be a sales rep. I went on to be the Sales Manager for the paper. The guy I won out the job over decided to start the Onion with his friend. You've never heard of me :-( ---- When they first started, their sales tactic was that the paper was a small tabloid -ize, with the entire bottom 3 inc…
Man that's something that would stick with you forever. Ugh, not recognizing opportunities in their infancy always scares me.
Re: The Onion quits print
#60I'll shed a single tear because I have nostalgia for the print version, but this isn't really such bad news. The Onion has evolved, not died. They grew quite successfully into digital (especially with video & social media), and they're now completing that transition by cutting off what has by now become a vestigial distribution channel.
I dunno, unless The Onion has an incredibly forward-thinking managerial class, then this cutback -- as well as the previous ones (including in its own hometown in Madison, WI) -- are reluctant measures taken in the face of budget shortfalls, i.e. these are cuts to the bone, rather than trimming the fat. And while fat organizations aren't exactly ideal, I think the expectation that the Onion maintains its finest group of writers while going through this kind of restructuring is unrealistic.
But to go back to the nostalgia thing, I'll miss a world in which you could carry around a newspaper made up of completely fake news.