I had a friend who studied journalism, and in his last year of school he was lucky enough to land an internship with The Onion. What he quickly learned was The Onion's internships are some of the most difficult in the industry. While other publications have to capture the facts surrounding a story, The Onion has to capture the zeitgeist of a time and place for their stories to be believable. The amount of research that goes into their stories is staggering.