One August weekend I was ploughing through The New York Times Saturday edition when a headline, “No Joke: The Onion Thinks Print is the Future of Media,” stopped me in my tracks. The article confirmed that, for the first time in over a decade, the satirical newspaper would resume printing a monthly edition, available by mailed subscription. This warmed the cockles of my heart on various levels. Upon arriving in America, I stumbled almost immediately upon The Onion, the news parody launched in 1990 by two University of Wisconsin students. By the time I got here in 1995, it had become widespread enough for a New Orleans friend to have a stack of back issues on his coffee table. For slightly subversive current events satire, it couldn’t be beat. Who, during the midst of the 1995 Bosnian crisis, could ignore a newspaper whose front-page headline screamed “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia; Cities of Sjlbvnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients”? I was hooked, and spent the rest of an afternoon snort-laughing my way through gleefully irreverent “news” under headlines like “New Study Reveals: Babies are Stupid,” “Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People,” “Meek Will Not Inherit Earth, Says Pope,” and, unforgettably, “Rosa Parks to Take Cab.” I bought a subscription and, for the ensuing decade, the paper’s dementedly revisionist version of whatever was making news continued finding ways to brighten even the darkest hours in American life. For example, on the front page of The Onion’s first issue to appear after 9/11 ran articles entitled, “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell: ‘We Expected Eternal Paradise for This,’ Say Suicide Bombers,” and “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie.” In 2008, when Barack Obama won the presidency, The Onion’s front page read “America Gives Hardest Job in the World to a Black Man.” It was profane and provocative, and somehow, by publishing absurd things about controversial, politically sensitive topics, managed to wring laughs from people across the political spectrum (those with a functioning sense of humor, anyway). When The Onion stopped printing in 2013, I was among many who mourned its absence; visiting a website to read issues digitally somehow robbed even the funniest and cleverest headlines of the impact they had when pulled from the mailbox.
So, upon learning that The Onion was returning to print, I made a headline of my own: “Area Publisher Subscribes to Someone Else’s Newspaper,” because if ever there was a time for satire, surely it is now. There is just so much to make fun of. Besides, after spending thirty years stubbornly printing Country Roads against a drumbeat of “print is dead” techno-futurism, the news that a beloved periodical is coming back to print feels like a turning point. The Onion is just the latest of a series of publications that tried going all-digital, only to restart the presses, recognizing that a good print magazine can serve as a welcome antidote to a deluge of digital content that seeks to monopolize every dimension of our consciousness. Others include Field and Stream, the music magazine NME, high-end outdoors journal Mountain Gazette, and the foodie bible Saveur. All have resumed printing this year. What do these titles have in common? Each offers meticulously researched, thoughtfully curated, lyrically written, beautifully presented coverage of a particular subject, then presents it to people who are passionate about it. Each has a beginning and an end, respects its audience’s intelligence, doesn’t try to trick or track them, and is a joy to pull from the mailbox. Like vinyl records, sailboats, and hardback books, some things are just better when you can touch them.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that, when it comes to the topics we care most about, we are drawn to the beauty, tactility and permanence of a printed page. Multiple studies have proved that readers retain more information from print—a fact that benefits advertisers too, since readers tend to assign deeper value to ads when encountering them alongside editorial they’re interested in. Actually, one of the most entertaining bits of The Onion was the ads, half of which were just as fake as the articles, making the real ones run by advertisers brave enough to support the enterprise, more engaging than ever. So, as I breathlessly await the arrival of my first edition in a decade, I’m rooting for The Onion’s success, and hoping that the millions of Americans in need of a good laugh will, like me, choose to support it by subscribing. If we do, perhaps the Americans referenced in the article “Americans Demand New Form of Media to Bridge Entertainment Gap While Looking from Laptop to Phone” will finally have what they’ve been looking for.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
