![]() ![]() The world of free has to change or arts and journalism will wither and writers starve. The New York Times website started charging recently but The Onion never had - not even for the newspaper - so the paywall is a brave experiment. How could such good writing pay its rent, I used to wonder. It used to worry me that I would laugh at The Onion every day for free. Never have I reached for a credit card so quickly. Last month it set up a $30 online paywall in Canada and the U.K. ![]() The Onion has eight million readers online, plus two million for its adjoining AV Club and 535,000 newspaper readers. can get more hits than The Onion website, he says. Sometimes people will read the headline and not read the story and not get the full take on something.” “Planned Parenthood does a lot of other things,” Tracy says, “and we made sure that point was in the article. Yet there were people who latched onto that and said, ‘This country is terrible. Like the controversial ‘ Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex’ in Kansas, six storeys, it had a waterslide, people would go there and drink margaritas and all the quotes are from people who talk about how great it was to get an abortion. “When you talk about Onion stories being cited by real people, it falls into two categories,” Garden says, “people who are naive and will believe anything that is put in print, and then people who have a political ideology and this story we run happens to back their ideology but is actually making terrible fun of it. They liked their hometowns, they learned from them, but they skittered out of there as fast as was courteous. These are the young, slightly scruffy, intensely smart guys who were your best friends in high school in Connellsville, Penn., the suburbs of Portland, Ore., and Richland Centre, Wis. I talked with three of The Onion’s handsome, peppy men: head writer Seth Reiss, associate editor Will Tracy and features editor Joe Garden. 28 along with the filthy sweary disingenuous headlines that are The Onion’s stock in trade. It’s just that it does it so beautifully - we are in the satiric stratosphere here - that it often reflects the quiet desperation of our daily lives better than mainstream newspapers like, say, The New York Times or the Toronto Star, which will launch its distribution of The Onion plus extra local AV Club content (the arts section) for free on Sept. You’d be amazed how many people fell for the Onion news headline, “ Pope Forgives Molested Children.” Hearty laughter at their expense! Those children remain unforgiven, obviously. Their comments are captured for ridicule. It’s a site for sincere people who get angry about Onion stories that they believe to be true and post them on Facebook while spitting with rage. ![]() On the other hand, Canadians probably end up on a lot. We are apparently “two distinct groups: those who are polite, and those who are too polite to bring up the fact that they’ve been placed in the wrong group.” Also it appears to think Hudson Bay is the world’s largest outdoor hockey rink. The Onion has not the faintest grasp of Canada (“ Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Government, Laws”) nor Canadians (“ Justin Bieber Found To Be Cleverly Disguised 51-Year-Old Pedophile”). So I went to its SoHo offices in New York to ward off mutual misunderstanding between these giants of parody journalism and the credulous Canadians who will be their victims. The satirical newspaper The Onion is coming to Toronto to be offered, free, in olde tyme newspaper boxes or sold by urchins on the street. ![]()
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