How the internet changed news, according to The Onion

How the internet changed news, according to The Onion

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/how-the-internet-changed-news-according-to-the-onion/

There is a lot of information in the article that is not relevant. However, this part is good.

In the late 1980s, news media was already suffering an identity crisis. Newspapers had a hard time competing with new media like television, specifically cable.

The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine eliminated the requirement for broadcast networks to cover contrasting views on issues deemed to be publicly important.

So [newspapers] had to jazz things up, focusing more and more on sensationalism.

The Onion started putting its paper online in the summer of 1996, only months after The New York Times did so. The internet didn’t change The Onion’s editorial process — at least at first. They simply took the physical newspaper and put it on the computer, uploading all of their stories once per week, just like they published the print version. A few years later they thought that, instead of dumping everything at the same time, it would be better to roll out stories gradually. That way, traffic would be more consistent.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, print media was dying. Newsweek went under [ceasing its print publication in 2012]. Circulation was cut down. But The Onion’s circulation was growing, and a lot of media looked at The Onion as an example of how to prevent further loss of readership. There was more news of the weird, more entertainment and celebrity-focused stories, more infotainment, less hard news and international coverage, headlines that were more overtly amusing.

The Onion had by then ventured into various mediums — books, comic books, TV pilots, radio shows, and a movie filmed in 2003. But online video was arguably the biggest new medium that The Onion and other digital media companies were investing in at the time.

Digital first

When The Onion switched from putting whole issues online at once to gradually releasing content throughout the week, it eventually changed their “two-week turnaround for stories into a one-day turnaround”.

It mirrored journalism’s broader switch to more and faster coverage, for better and for worse.

By 2013, the year when The Onion sold its last physical copy, the paper had already moved to a “digital first” strategy, publishing about twice the content it had run the previous year. A 2013 Slate article argued that

upping output had traded quality for quantity

at least slightly, noting that The Onion’s

once extremely selective pitch meetings (where only a tiny handful of pitched jokes would make it through) had gone from weekly to daily.