The Onion brought back its print edition and the gamble is paying off | Hacker News Reader

The Onion brought back its print edition and the gamble is paying off

wsj.com

194 pointsandsoitis65 comments

I kinda have the print edition of the Onion to thank for my career.

Back in 2000, I had a "100% travel" tech consulting job. My favorite part of the week was finally getting back home to Chicago, grabbing a sub at a sandwich shop, and casually reading that week's edition cover to cover Saturday afternoon.

One particular week, there was an ad for a local tech company (ThoughtWorks). I don't remember there being many tech job ads in the Onion at the time, so it stood out. I remember the ad copy being something like "Does your life suck, or just your job? Work here instead." I immediately applied, interviewed, eventually got an offer, quit my other job, and started at ThoughtWorks. It was a massive upgrade.

A few years later, I got to lead an internal dev team, and a spin-off project (Selenium) came out of that.

Long story long: No Onion, no job at ThoughtWorks, no Selenium.

Glad a new generation gets to enjoy leisurely reading fake news and seeing where it takes them in life.

Selenium?

That stack birthed almost an entire category of QA jobs.

Awesome story. hat-tip

Selenium is useful beyond testing too.

I "optimized around" some tedious expense report filing a few years back with it.

the project that selenium was extracted from was... a timesheet and expense reporting system!

Wow! I had no idea! Thanks for sharing that.

It's the circle of life!

So the onion is, by distant proxy, responsible for that time my school blocked all non-chrome browsers on their gradebook, messing up all the teachers who use edge. Have you ever tried Helium? (https://helium.readthedocs.io/)

wow, that's nuts. i don't see the connection, though? were people using selenium on the gradebook? selenium drives chrome, too.

haven't used helium before.

The grading situation sucked (disconnects between services), i was using selenium with the firefox driver to create a 3rd party service with data normalization, i think the auditor that was looking at logs was unhappy with the github codespace ip i was using and decided that chrome is superior.

I feel like there's a funny Onion article version of this story :-D

Traveling Businessman Makes QA Automator After Mistaking Joke Newspaper For Reality.

Authentic News, Ad Clicks Faked

Area Man

a slightly more generalized re-mix:

skynet inventor credits dystopian fake news for inspiration to create dystopian reality

TO is supposed to transport you away from life suck for 0.5-10 seconds. No warranties or refunds though.

I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.

Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air. It supported waiting for element change instead of timeouts or polling

i'm always amazed by the over-the-top criticism. did you pay money for it? were you forced to use it? did you try to help improve it?

localy the equivilant would be if The Coast came back to print.Phones suck for staying in touch with the local sceen.I have noticed a significant increase in postering for events, music and a few more local only type retail stores,and millenials leaning in on traditional trades, craftwork, art, etc. I mean nothing beats a good meme or wacked video on tictok etall, but then it's like time to do something, and the algorythim isn't set up for that.

I need to thank you for my first job out of college (auto QA for a spring/ReST web app) and also for helping me automate several browser games.

I have such emotional damage with Selenium. But atlas the limits of the tools at the time.

Puppeteer was such a breathe of fresh air.

I wrote so many sophisticated, nearly magical Selenium helpers in PHP for massive test suites for a fairly prominent website in the early 2000s. I remember simultaneously having a sense of great accomplishment and deep shame and frustration, haha. It was so hard to build good testing tools. I think we did alright, though.

These days I write automated UI tests with barely a second thought. It has gotten so much easier.

It turns out it came out in 2004. I had no idea I was working with cutting edge testing software at the time. That also explains why it was so rough on the edges and there were so few resources to draw on to get it working better in edge cases. Although it was kind of brutal, I think selenium taught me a ton about asynchronicity and concurrency. That was probably good for my career

I used to get the print edition of The Economist. It really does feel a lot different from browsing reddit/HN/etc.

* You're reading in a linear format. Fewer distractions.

* No tabsplosion. No clickbait titles.

* Little to zero internet drama.

* You're leaned back on the couch instead of hunched over a computer or phone.

* You're closer to reading about a random/representative sample of what's going on in the world, as opposed to the "dog bites man" internet story of the week. Fewer breathless takes on everything.

The nice thing about a print magazine is that it actually does its job of giving you a break from your day, instead of turning into a distraction timesuck. It's easy to put down after reading an article or two that strikes your interest.

Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.

> The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style

That’s their intention since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance

I’m a subscriber for about 15 years now, and they shoved their opinion down my throat even 15 years ago. That didn’t change. Unfortunately, they are still better than almost anything else imho.

I don't mind them having an opinion. I do mind them (for example) stating that individuals at a particular political conference "look like they had been bullied as children, or else should have been bullied".

How do you rank the Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg, and FT? I view them as the big 4 English-language "serious investor publications" -- curious if you can think of others. (Generally I view investor publications as more incentivized towards accuracy. Investors will pay for information which allows them to make accurate predictions about asset prices. That's a better feedback loop for truth than most publications get. Lots of real-world events are reflected in asset prices.)

They are way more sloppy when the topic is for example poverty, inequality, etc. Economist has also problems with these kind of topics, but way less. I know people who prefer WSJ/Bloomberg/FT. All of them are from wealthy families, with zero clue about average people, and some of them even consider themselves poor, when they are rich as fuck. That hypocrisy is better fitted for those. I'm quite annoyed by that view. I'm even annoyed by Economist's elitism. The Economist has these topics because it's beneficial for the elite to solve these, the others simply ignore this fact.

The snark is part of the vibe. The world is full of people still working through their inferiority/superiority complex. Many of them convene in the Halls of Power. The Economist reminds them all that they are still mortal.

I can get plenty of snark for free online, thanks.

The Economist is much like LLMs: good if you don't know much about the subject.

> Unfortunately I did notice a bit of a slide in quality as The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style that's super common online.

Is the Economist still publishing a print edition? Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.

I cancelled my subscription a while ago, but it appears the print edition is still being advertised online: https://subscribenow.economist.com/summersale/

>Barnes and Noble hasn't had a new issue since mid-July.

Twice a year, during the summer and around xmas, they ship a really thick issue with lots of extra articles and then take a few weeks off. Perhaps this is their summer break?

I know, but the last issue available is mid-July and normal sized, with "Cancer" on the cover.

The way they will incorporate an absurd mix of expressive poetic technical and satirical writing in the same piece — to the point of belaboring it and wearing you down until you can’t help but laugh is what I love. Compendiums off Amazon used books are about $8 I bought a stack a few years ago. “What Makes Anna so Beautiful in the Moonlight?” is a favorite for some reason (nerd explains beauty). Also the Onion Film Standard “The Onion Looks Back at E.T.” Maybe this means Nathan Fielder will resurrect his short lived hardcopy newspaper “The Diarrhea Times” too if there’s an appetite!

Game Informer is doing the same. I got the most recent copy and it was just a breath of fresh air. Articles written for their content, not to fill some quota or drive clicks. It was a month late (mostly stuff about SGF) but it didn’t matter. I got to read what these passionate writers thought of the games and demos there and that was a great read, even if it wasn’t “news”.

Really? I had a subscription to GI for a year or so because it came free with the GameCube I bought from Gamestop. I assumed it was just GS' in house ad rag. It's cool to know it still exists...

Oh wait what's that, I just went to wikipedia and I was correct in my assessment but also now it's independent? Shit I might just subscribe for the sake of it.

Entertainment is more timeless than ‘news’. You can keep the copies in stock for a month or more, which is great for kiosks. Additionally, entertainment can be fun for bored traveling people.

You might like Edge magazine. I've gotten a handful of copies over the years and have been consistently impressed by the quality.

As one of the subscribers, I can confirm that I’m satisfied with the product. And looking forward to each edition of America’s finest news source.

Their story review meetings really cut out for them by the rise of AI slop chumbox advertisers, lazy journalists using AI, cartoonish political figures playing third-world warlords, Chester Sokolsky's sub basement Q Anon daily, and Tim Pool taking Russian money.

Respect to Jeff Lawson, the quality of the Onion, which had grown a bit stale in the preceding decade, has noticeably improved since he purchased the company last year.

Can you go into more detail? I had largely written off the Onion as I thought it had become try-hard partisan political satire (I'm fairly sure that's mostly consensus?). Even when I agreed with the premise, I thought it was pretty terrible.

Has it gone away from that?

> I'm fairly sure that's mostly consensus

The consensus is that's it's terrible try-hard partisan political satire? Can you go into more detail?

It just seemed to be the general mood about. I'd see a link somewhere online to the Onion and it'd always be be commented as such. I haven't been a regular reader of the Onion for something like 15 years probably. That's why I stopped and those comments are why I never went back.

The parent comment I replied to is the first indication of any change I've seen since.

A few of their peers casually said so, likely. Who has time to do a market survey to determine what they should read?

Our family has been debating this, but we lean on it having improved, too. We wondered if having to fill the print layout again helps.

We would snag copies of The Onion at the University of Minnesota many many years ago. Always fun. I’m glad they brought it back. It was always a great casual read

Was one of my fav thing about being in Madison in the mid-90s. Especially the “Drunk of the Week” because you always checked to see if it was someone you knew.

The next time I'm in the area I'll have to check to see if it's still true that copies of The Onion are offered all over the place at no cost (I'm guessing they don't do it anymore though). Back in the 90s I was actually shocked when I saw that people in other places had to pay money for them.

I did a college visit to UW in 1998, and leafing through The Onion at Union Terrace on Lake Mendota after the tour was one of the deciding factors for me to go there.

My uncle was/is friends with Tim Keck since he started the Onion at UW Madison.

Used to get handed a stack and asked to spread them around high school.

Years later uncle texts asking if I have weed. At the time yeah I always did. He says bring it to the Berrymore and I smoked up Tim, Eric, and John C Reilly like nbd.

Ahh the old days.

Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.

(Also, UM has, or had back when I read it, the best school newspaper I've ever read.)

I heard UIUC had it too in the 90's. Can anyone confirm?

I can confirm. I started grad school in physics there in 1992. The weekly department colloquium was on Thursday afternoon, just after the latest Onion came out. It was not uncommon to see a few people reading it during the talk.

Yes.

All the Big Ten schools that a founder who grew up in Indiana and Wisconsin cared about had it. Maybe even Ohio State. I’m not sure how far east it got back then.

Reminds me of an interview with one of its founders who said it's becoming increasingly difficult to parody Kafkaesque insanity. They said something like humor is a temporary salve from the awfulness of reality, even in the face of terrible, repetitive occurrences like mass shootings that aren't themselves funny at all.

And, meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity for satirical social commentary with less offensive, cheap shots rather than brutally criticizing and challenging the core flaws like idiocy, meanness, and selfishness of corrupt, hypocritical, and criminal political personalities.

There's even a Wikipedia page now for The Onion's handling of mass shootings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

> … meanwhile, South Park hasn't really evolved and misses the opportunity…

i understand where you’re coming from looking at the most recent seasons, but this year has that humor bite that it used to have years ago. i’m not sure what they changed, but it really does capture the sassy claws it had in the early seasons.

it just completely slices up so many of the fantasy goggles so many people are wearing.

i can understand why certain cultish groups in the tech sphere are stinging though.

I've found South Park's comedy and commentary to have both been incredibly on point this season. It does require some previous investment in the characters from the last two decades, so it might not be as accessible to new viewers, but making Donald Trump a reincarnation of Saddam Hussein and having Craig beat Cartman at being a right wing podcast grifter, are incredibly satisfying arcs that play on the established lore and character traits very well. And it hasn't been above making an earnest point e.g. about when is it worth selling out your values in episode 2 with Mr. Mackey

I read the first paragraph, immediately tabbed over to the Onion website, and put down a crisp hundred dollar bill without a second thought. Hell yes. Thanks for posting.

Guess I know what subscription the wife is getting for Christmas.

First time I read The Onion was at University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1980s. There was no "online edition" at that time

Even as a student newspaper it was remarkably funny

Print subscription - $99 (or pay more) / year:

https://membership.theonion.com/

Makes sense, we have moved so far into the digital space where articles are short, filled with ads and there's an article on almost everything.

Print goes back to considered articles for that point in time, limited ads that don't jump out in front of me and something that takes me away from a computer screen which is different. Sometimes I need different.

Not a huge Onion fan, but I absolutely love that they did this. I get so irritated by paper offerings that went 'digital only' like it was some upgrade for me.

I spend more than half my day on screens. Sometimes it's nice to take a break.

As a Chicagoan this fills me with pride!

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