{"id":13475,"date":"2008-12-03T00:08:26","date_gmt":"2008-12-03T07:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2008\/12\/03\/peeling-the-onion.html"},"modified":"2008-12-03T00:08:26","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T07:08:26","slug":"peeling_the_onion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/12\/03\/peeling_the_onion.html","title":{"rendered":"Peeling “The Onion”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A fun article about the weekly creation of my favorite satirical newspaper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

If you were a prospective gag headline, you would probably feel about the writers’ room at the Onion the way World War II soldiers felt about the view of Omaha Beach as the landing craft doors yawned open. By midafternoon on a Monday, at the paper’s SoHo offices in Manhattan, the writers at America’s most successful satirical newsweekly had mowed down somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 possible headlines in search of a dozen or so solid comic premises around which an issue of the paper would be built.<\/p>\n

In an inversion of the traditional editorial process, the Onion chooses its headlines and then invents stories to fit them. For a headline to have made the first cut, at least two of the six writers in attendance had to okay it, generally an occasion of little fanfare in which a couple of people threw up their hands and murmured with a defeated sigh, “Sure, why the hell not?” Among the survivors were “Sudanese Man Best In Village At Stacking Bodies”; “Really Loud Whistle Guy Takes Every Opportunity To Whistle Loudly”; “Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band Jobless Rate Hits 20%”; “Kid Not Sure What To Do With Sex And The City Action Figures”; “Bill Clinton Sadly Folds First Lady Dress Back Into Box”; “Price of Gas Rises To Four Expletives Per Gallon”; “50-Year-Old Prince Licks AARP Representative’s Face”; and “Op-Ed: It Figures That Right After I Wash My Car, It Rains Blood.”<\/p>\n

The choicest material — the staff writers’ ideas — had been pitched this morning, and the writers were sorting through the chaff, the jokes sent in each week by part-time contributors, known in local editorial parlance as “the [expletive] list.” The writers fidgeted and slumped in their chairs, visibly oppressed by the haze of failed hilarity thickening in the room.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I read the Onion pretty much every week (as it’s distributed in downtown Denver). And I introduced it to my in-laws while they were visiting (they found this<\/a> and this<\/a> story particularly amusing).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fun article about the weekly creation of my favorite satirical newspaper. If you were a prospective gag headline, you would probably feel about the writers’ room at the Onion the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fourth-estate"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":26115,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/06\/snrk.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":0},"title":"Snrk","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 6-Feb-12 6:12pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Heh. #ddtb Embedded Link Congressman Posts Satirical Attack On Planned Parenthood From The Onion As News Fool him once, shame on you. Fool him once with a widely circulated and obviously fake story from satirical newspaper The Onion that was published nine months ago? Yeah, that\u2019s all on him. Congressman...","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":129091,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/08\/the-onion-writers-are-reading-my-mind.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":1},"title":"The "Onion" writers are reading my mind","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 8-Dec-15 6:26pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Especially the \"increasingly nervous\" part. Originally shared by +The Onion: \u2018This Will Be The End Of Trump\u2019s Campaign,\u2019 Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year SALISBURY, MD\u2014Repeating identical comments he had made in June, July, August, September, and twice in November, increasingly nervous local man Aaron Howe responded\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3729,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/04\/put_this_on_my.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":2},"title":"Put this on my wish list","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 4-Apr-03 10:07pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The whole \"refrigerator poetry magnets\" thing has gotten a bit passe. But who could resist this 276 word Onion headline magnet kit? Not me. Now if only we had space...","rel":"","context":"In "Potpourri"","block_context":{"text":"Potpourri","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/potpourri"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":167,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/06\/04\/hizzoner.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":3},"title":"Hizzoner","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 4-Jun-03 11:33am","format":false,"excerpt":"Denver now becomes, I believe, the City with the Funniest Mayor's Name, as John Hickenlooper becomes mayor. Though, in a sop to headline writers, he opines that they can just...","rel":"","context":"In "Politics & Law"","block_context":{"text":"Politics & Law","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8830,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/04\/10\/how_google_is_c.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":4},"title":"How Google is changing news reporting","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 10-Apr-06 7:57am","format":false,"excerpt":"The advent of folks using the Internet to search for news -- in particular, looking at Google News -- is changing all sorts of things about news reporting -- most...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":25565,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/18\/why-write-novels-at-all.html","url_meta":{"origin":13475,"position":5},"title":""Why Write Novels at All?"","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 18-Jan-12 8:27pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Dear Garth Risk Hallberg (if that is, really, your name), did you actually mean to submit this to The Onion rather than the New York Times Magazine? Because it sure reads like a determined attempt at a satiric send-up of lit-crit philosophizing utterly divorced from anything that 99.999% of readers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}