Is there any inside take out there on whether the problem was "you can't run a news/political commentary rag profitably" or "you can't run it profitably enough"?
I don't know anything about their CEO, except that Wikipedia notes that in 2020, "GMG Union, which represents the staff of six G/O Media sites, announced a vote of no confidence in CEO Jim Spanfeller, citing, among other issues, a lack of willingness to negotiate for 'functional editorial independence protections.'"
I doubt they'd shut The Onion down. The brand is pretty well known at this point and that has value. If they don't want it, selling it to someone who does is likely the play.
If you go back a day or two I'd have said the thing for The Escapist not being willing to put themselves in jeopardy but here we are.
Companies are stupid sometimes.
The Escapist is a much, much smaller brand than The Onion. Looking at google trends, the search traffic for The Onion is about 35x that of The Escapist over the past 12 months. It's also in a much more crowded space than The Onion and a much younger brand. The Onion is a big fish in a small pond whereas the The Escapist is a minnow in a vast sea. I don't think they're comparable.