The Onion has been one of the best newspapers in the USA for many years now. It launched as a print publication in 1988 and moved online in 1996. That means they’ve had a website for nearly 30 years. And finally that website is on WordPress!
The Onion covered the re-launch in their own style: “Nation Wary Of Suddenly Usable Website“. They interviewed a user who “became visibly distressed as they scrolled through the webpage that seemingly overnight had become simple to navigate, aesthetically pleasing, and unburdened by unhinged, shitty ads breaking up every block of text to advertise bowel-cleansing remedies and weight-loss drugs.”
That jab at online ads becomes clearer when you listen to this episode of the Decoder podcast from Verge. The interview is with Ben Collins and Danielle Strle, the new CEO and chief product officer of The Onion. The interviewer says “You very notably took Taboola off the pages.” Taboola produces exactly the kind of ads that The Onion was mocking in its article.
The Onion will focus more on growing the site’s membership which starts at $60 per year, including the print edition. They mention several membership-driven sites that we’ve talked about before:
It’s Defector and Aftermath and 404 Media and these places that were progenitors to this model. We can do this stuff first. We can lean heavily on our subscribers and try to make them really happy and give them something in the mail, but we can do this other stuff, too. We can make video. We can sell ads the old-fashioned way. That’s what we decided to do — stand up a company that’s based on people genuinely liking our content, not tricking people into clicking stuff all the time, and that’s where we’re at.
Later in the interview, they talk about the move to WordPress. They discuss migrating away from the Kinja platform, which was the CMS used at the Gawker Media Group.
Did you have to hire designers and engineers? How did you pick a platform?
Danielle Strle: We kicked the tires on a lot of stuff. We talked to a number of really great agencies. Honestly, it was really like a fun sales process to be the client representing The Onion in a bidding process between design and dev shops wanting to work on this project. Everyone has been so great. I would’ve hired them all if I had four Onions. But yeah, we worked with a company called MG Strategy and Design. They’re distributed and have a lot of deep experience in newsrooms, both in paper and digitally. So, we have been excited to work with them on both getting the website up and getting the DNC paper designed and templates for our new papers moving forward. And they’re just such a dream team. They have something like 200 collective years’ experience in newspapers and digital newspapers. We moved on to WordPress. We looked at other platforms, of course. But yeah, moving fast, here we are. It’s a WordPress world.
We’re seeing a lot of moves like this to WordPress and away from private platforms. Did I mention that The Verge is also moving to WordPress?
The interview also includes a funny jab at Matt Mullenweg and his attempts to turn around Tumblr:
Everyone’s going to end up moving to WordPress. They’re going to be a monopoly, and I’m going to have [WordPress CEO] Matt [Mullenweg] back on the show and be like, “What are you going to do with all of your untold riches and power?”
Danielle Strle: Ask him what he’s going to do to keep Tumblr in its glorious state. Do that for me.
