Not The Onion: Journalist-turned-CEO Ben Collins calls the satire site Gen Z’s “paper of record”
The former disinformation reporter is making serious moves at the faux news outlet.
In April, the archly named company Global Tetrahedron, owned by Jeff Lawson, a co-founder and former CEO of the tech company Twilio, purchased the legendary satirical news site The Onion from G/O Media for an undisclosed sum. This summer, the new management brought back The Onion’s print edition — it comes out monthly and runs subscribers $99 a year — for the first time in more than a decade.
And yesterday, the company revived the parody video newscast the Onion News Network with a segment entitled “God’s Penis Visible in Night Sky for First Time in Millennia.” In an absurdist twist, ONN’s news anchor is played by former MSNBC host Joshua Johnson.
“It is as if fans of the baseball team took over the baseball team,” Global Tetrahedron CEO Ben Collins tells Depth Perception. “Basically, we are trying to find the things that we like about this place and reinvigorate them, and find ways to pay for them and make a sustainable place to work that is unencumbered by the fake economy of chasing traffic and weird scams.” He adds that so far, “doing stuff that people want” — like bringing back the print edition and ONN — “has been a successful strategy.”
Collins is an unexpected CEO. He’s a veteran journalist who, until earlier this year, covered disinformation (“the worst shit in the world”) as a reporter at NBC News. Before he departed, he, Lawson, and others got together to take over The Onion. The move, he says, has been a rewarding one. “Sometimes the fake journalism is a better window into reality than some of the real stuff,” he says.
Collins, who now lives in Chicago, where The Onion is based, recently spoke to Depth Perception about his career transition and his plans for the faux news outlet. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm
Before coming on board, what was your attachment to The Onion? Were you just a reader?
I was just a reader. I didn’t know anybody there. I just loved it a lot.
Our first phone call, when trying to figure out basically what the price was and what was for sale, was the union. We were like, “What’s the deal? Why is this place so aggressively for sale, and why can’t people seem to make any money on it?” We had heard through a whisper network that the union was this big scary thing and what they wanted was ridiculous, and that’s the reason no one would buy them. But what they wanted was for anything that was going to be AI to be labeled as AI, which is just a good idea, and a salary floor raise. So we’re like, “That’s not bad.”
We ended up developing a relationship with people in the newsroom. We started talking to them and trying to get the vibe of what they wanted and what their pain points were. And their pain points were things like having to fill up slideshows to get people to refresh the page. I think we all viewed this as, If we have a good plan for this thing, we can do a lot of good work. This place just needed a baseline of TLC to be a powerhouse again.
Until fairly recently, you were a political disinformation reporter. What made you think, I can be the CEO of a revered media brand?
You look around and you see who the CEOs of stuff are, and you’re like, “How bad can this be?” I mean, you look at Elon, and he can purchase something he knows nothing about and destroy it. And I figured, I could purchase this thing I know a lot about and try to help it out.
We’ve all been at these places where we see the people above us, and we’re like, “Why are they doing this? What is this for? Who is this for? Is this some sort of self-enrichment scheme?” I kind of wanted to see if there was something that I was missing, if there was some large disconnect about how things worked that I didn’t understand. And so far, it has not really been proven to be true.
The latest from Long Lead: “An Unnatural Disaster”
In recent weeks, America has been engaged in a bizarre, disinformation-laden conversation about Haitians. Meanwhile, over the past 15 months, Long Lead has been hard at work on deeply-sourced feature about Haiti, specifically the city of Canaan, which emerged from the rubble of 2010’s apocalyptic earthquake to rival cities like Buffalo, New York; Madison, Wisconsin; and Irvine, California in size. And it’s still growing.
In “An Unnatural Disaster,” international journalist Jacob Kushner follows a group of Haitians, desperate to save their country, as they build a new city from nothing, only to risk their lives against an even bigger danger: the long, slow, violent collapse of their national government. Brought to life by dozens of photos by Allison Shelley, this Long Lead feature reflects Haiti’s beauty and chaos, the hope of its people, and the dire straits of their plight.
More than a decade in the making, it’s tremendously relevant journalism that was made for exactly this moment.
Ignore the false narrative. Read and share “An Unnatural Disaster” today.
Speaking of Elon, in late 2022 NBC News temporarily suspended you from covering Musk in response to tweets you made regarding his purchase of Twitter. How did that experience affect you?
I didn’t like it. It was baffling. Not to go through it all again, but I think our team at NBC was doing some of the best work on what was actually going on in Twitter at that time. We were getting scoop after scoop. We were very well-sourced, and then for that to happen, it felt bananas — there was clearly something else going on there that I don’t want to think about. [The suspension] was dumb. It was a very mainstream media kind of thing to happen. But God bless [Elon]. Whatever is going on in that man's head, I hope he goes to a regular therapist and figures it out.
More specifically, did it affect how you are now as a manager?
Oh yeah. Stand by your reporters. Stand by the people in your room, especially when you’re receiving pressure from the richest people in the world. Especially taking over a place like this, where the point is to poke power pretty hard, I always incentivize [the writers] to be smart and just let them do what they want. Editorially, they are allowed to do whatever they want. I haven't been near a headline before it got published.
What has been the most eye-opening part of switching from an editorial role to a CEO role?
There are a lot of boring moving pieces. There’s a lot of contracts. It’s a different world. Also, you have to think long term, more strategically, about where things are going, and support your people in ways that make sense for them. We are intentionally outnumbered here. There’s a couple of executives and a giant writer's room. And our goal is just to get the best out of them. How do we get them to be in a place where they’re happy and want to come to work, and how do we maintain that? That’s a different challenge than my previous job, which was calling people who didn't want to talk to you to answer questions they didn’t want to answer.
Given that we’re in an election year, I’m wondering if you’re missing the disinformation beat at all?
No. It’s a sucker’s game, man. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. What matters is the pressure campaign that is against your story, and if that can affect how people perceive the truth. That’s annoying. And as a reporter, you’re not given enough weapons rhetorically to say, “Hey, this story is a big deal, and these people are lying about it on the other side.” It’s the disease and poison of the way the media has traditionally worked in the last, I don’t know, many decades.
“You look around and you see who the CEOs of stuff are, and you’re like, ‘How bad can this be?’ I mean, you look at Elon, and he can purchase something he knows nothing about and destroy it. And I figured, I could purchase this thing I know a lot about and try to help it out.” — Ben Collins
The big news with The Onion is that it has returned to print after more than a decade as a digital-only publication. Why is this a smart move in 2024?
It makes a lot of sense. People were begging us to give it back immediately, and they're not wrong. The economics of it have been really good for us. I’m not allowed to say numbers, but I felt like Vice [which is relaunching as a print magazine] wanted to get 10,000 subscribers by next year, and that took us a couple of days. But also, it’s fucking fun. It’s exciting for the staff to do. There’s a new canvas for them, and they’re enjoying it.
All these other places are like, “Please give me 10 bucks a month, and I’ll send you a blog.” That’s not enough. From us, you get a really good paper that sits on your coffee table and is the funniest thing in your house. You get it once a month, and people are excited to get something in the mail again. We want to make it grow and be a big thing. And maybe we’ll be the last remaining newspaper at the end of the day.
You also just revived the Onion News Network. What was the thinking behind getting back into video?
That’s the other thing that people really wanted out of us. Do you remember around 10, 12 years ago, it really felt like the internet was gonna make things better? And one of those things was ONN on YouTube. There was no point to it other than making big jokes on a big budget. And I just wanted that back. I wanted that feeling back.
And also, dude, we have more TikTok followers than the New York Times. We have four million Instagram followers. We have a big multimedia operation, and the best way to fill that is with ONN. [Young people] trust us, because our Palestine work, even before I got here, was just so good. And, you know, it built real rapport with the kids on [social media]. The meme is “The Onion never misses.” We have two very disparate audiences. We have every 40-year-old white guy named Dan in the country, and then we have a bunch of Gen Z kids who view us as the paper of record.
So how do you plan to expand The Onion empire next?
Many ways. But don’t I want to scare the shit out of my staff. They already have to put out a paper every month, and they have to put out a website, live tweet the debate and election night. They have to come up with new characters and stuff. So our first and foremost thing is to stabilize what we got. We have these big tent poles here that we want to push, and we want our members to be as happy as possible. We want to make sure that every time they get something in the mail or in their inbox, they’re excited.
Do you know The Onion [faux reality] show Sex House? It’s from the YouTube money era. The first episode has almost 35 million views on YouTube, and it feels adjacent to everything that's happening in culture now. And that’s our future: We want to be the biggest bizarro funhouse mirror on American life that is available.
I think we’re on our way. We’ve got our footing now. We’re well-positioned for the election, and well-positioned to the end of year. It requires people to buy some papers to start. But we’re really excited about what we’ve done so far and what we have gone through. Sorry to sound like a CEO there at the end.
Ben Collins’ favorite Onion stories
“Somebody Should Do Something About All The Problems” (Aug. 21, 1996)
“Mr. Autumn Man Walking Down Street With Cup Of Coffee, Wearing Sweater Over Plaid Collared Shirt” (Oct. 10, 2012)
“Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential in AI” (June 1, 2023)
“This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t” (March 26, 2003)
“‘The Onion’ Stands With Israel Because It Seems Like You Get In Less Trouble For That” (Oct. 13, 2023)