Ben Collins, CEO of the revived The Onion, is profiled by Chris Murphy for Vanity Fair. He has interesting ideas on how to succeed in the whitewater rapids of modern media, and he's proving them in print and online.
Instead, Collins has focused on getting The Onion the resources it so desperately needed, as well as pruning back the bullshit so the paper's content can shine. "We took this thing that was dying a slow internet heat death and turned it into a real newspaper and much bigger business," he exclusively tells Vanity Fair. "There was a boner-pill ad shawl that covered all of our content, and you just couldn't read it. We got rid of all of it. We reset revenue to zero for a month or two while we figured out how to make and ship a paper to tens of thousands of people."
Collins was on the disinfo beat at NBC News and experienced first-hand the higher-ups there accomodating themselves to power "a couple of years ago."
There was a flip that switched a couple of years ago where I started seeing my bosses thinking, like, Uh oh, he's going to continue to report on Elon Musk? This is not a great thing. Everyone could see them shaking their collars out. They were like, The fascism's coming, and he's still doing this?
And now everyone's talking about The Onion again—and its work.
