Twilio cofounder buys The Onion The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web. Jeff Lawson, who cofounded Twilio in 2008, declared on Twitter that he had bought the "national treasure" to save it from being "stifled" by poor commercial practices. " …
"If you care about The Onion, if The Onion ever made you laugh – give us a buck. For that dollar, you get… absolutely nothing. Just a smug sense that you've once again spent less on The Onion than it's worth in your life,"
He shouldn't get ahead of himself. Things I read online, smirk and move on are not quite worth that much.
As someone who used to read the Onion when they specifically covered Madison, Wisconsin (and remembers the story of Van Vleck (where the math department was housed at UWisc) being pushed over by drunken students (it makes more sense if you see the building)), I'm glad that the Onion is being kept around, at least in some form.
I felt they lost something when they went national, but they kept coming out with bits here and there that showed some of the same biting wit found in the Onion when they were local-only.
Amongst the things I miss? The craziest, most inane police reports of them all. (The line at the time was it was the only thing in the Onion that was accurate).
As for ads, even back then as a pure physical paper publication, it had some rather *interesting* ads.
I remember that right after 9/11 the onion published an article saying, "The US vows to attack whoever it is that did this to the United States!" And the onion claimed the protesters were already marching in Washington with black guards reading, " us out of somewhere!"
It was a necessary dose of hilarious humor at the timeñ. But today, nobody is joking about the 500,000 people the United States and George Bush and Dick Cheney killed needlessly in Iraq ....
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