Tim Keck was short a few hundred dollars for his rent and tuition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
So he got creative.
It was 1988. Keck, the son of a Chicago media bigwig and an investigative reporter focusing on environmental issues, decided to turn to his family business, starting with a monthly calendar created in collaboration with a cartoonist on campus.
“It did really well. They made money off of it. And he’s like, ‘I want to start a newspaper. I’m going to drop out of school for a little while and start a newspaper, and that’s going to be my job,’” Christine Wenc, a friend of Keck since his college years, said.
Keck asked his friends, including Wenc, to join his newspaper venture, and they gathered in his apartment to brainstorm a way to make their paper unique — at the time, there was no shortage of student newspapers in Madison. Inspired by a parody paper put out by The Daily Cardinal student newspaper on April Fools’ Day, the team decided to create a paper that would tell completely fake stories.
They named it The Onion, and thus began an iconic publication that would become synonymous with satirical news in America.
While The Onion wasn’t considered a student paper, as it was completely independently run, it was a huge hit at the university, Wenc, whose 2025 book “Funny Because It’s True” traces the publication’s history, said. Absurdist headlines — “Mendota Monster Mauls Madison,” for example — made it an eye-catcher.
“It was really successful right off the bat,” Wenc said. “It just really did its own thing.”
A weekly print publication, The Onion’s early editions featured satirical news stories, comics and fiction, with space for coupons to local, mostly student-oriented establishments. It also spread from Madison to other college towns in the Midwest and later locales around the country.
Then, in 1996, The Onion’s online version became one of the first — and, quickly, most successful — humor sites on the World Wide Web, pushing its content in front of a national and eventually global audience.
“It really kind of went supernova,” Wenc said.
For Wenc, The Onion’s success came from how well it matched Gen X’s sense of humor: many of the articles and headlines were derived from the dry humor of David Letterman and the over-the-top absurdity of Mad Magazine.
Those stories also captured the lived experience of everyday people, especially those in so-called flyover country, and poked fun at the coverage of Midwestern small-town newspapers that the writers grew up with, Wenc said. The “area man” trope — stories that find humor through the perspective of a regular person — became a staple of the paper.
“A lot of those early writers, they were first-generation college students … Their dad worked in a cheese factory. Their mom was a housewife. They’re coming from a much more blue-collar, working-class kind of background,” Wenc said. “I think that really spoke to people.”
Chad Nackers, who joined The Onion during its Madison days and is the current editor-in-chief, echoed that The Onion’s Midwestern voice and blue-collar sensibility helped with its early success.
“There used to be a joke going around that you wouldn’t be on the staff unless you had cleaned a grease trap at a restaurant,” Nackers said. “It was a ragtag group of folks. We’re all doing our sh***y jobs at the same time that we’re doing this job.”
After several years of early success and management changeovers, The Onion began its transformation toward a more cohesive newspaper, Wenc said. While still packed with parodies, the content was also evolving. Instead of nonsensical, zany stories, it moved toward headlines and articles that use its absurdity to critique real issues.
“I’d pitch really simple headlines, like ‘Detroit Sold For Scrap,’” Nackers said. “It’s a pretty simple headline, but it’s so much to unpack when you’re treating Detroit like a used car that doesn’t work anymore. It’s also got some stuff that comments on things like urban decay and how we’ve let our cities fall apart.”
In 2001, the company decided to move to New York City.
“I think we felt like we had been walking up and down the same street,” Nackers said. “We wanted opportunities to work with other comedians, maybe pitch movies, TV shows, to have more of a professional community, and New York felt like a perfect place for that.”
The Onion launched Onion News Network in 2007, making video stories with the same satirical charm as those in print. In 2011, the Independent Film Channel picked Onion News Network up for two seasons. During this time, The Onion also made a spin-off called Onion SportsDome, which aired on Comedy Central for a season.
But the publication’s coastal era didn’t last long. It decided to return to the Midwest in 2012, this time with headquarters in Chicago. The city already hosted The Onion’s business staff, and it was much cheaper to operate the company there, Nackers said.
The move came with some casualties. “We lost probably a good half of our old staffers who were just like, ‘I’m not moving,’” Nackers said. But to him, it also returned The Onion to its roots. In Chicago, they hired new local staff into fellowship positions and kick-started the paper once again.
In 2024, The Onion also returned to another of its traditions: a print edition. Nackers sees it as a response to the social media age. Readers are seeing jokes one at a time, curated by the algorithm. That takes away the interplay between different stories on a print or web page, which is part of the joke, he said.
At a time when legacy newspapers are moving away from print — at the end of 2025, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city’s paper of record, became the largest publication to cease printing so far — The Onion is also hoping its print edition can ride the tide of the physical media revival.
“Younger people are more into vinyl and stuff like that now,” Nackers said. “There have been a lot of studies that are showing that people want physical things, and they feel burnt by digital media, where you buy a thing, but then the license expires and you don’t own that Kindle book anymore, or you don’t have access to that video game.”
Like The Onion, Wenc had her homecoming to the Midwest after living 20 years on the East Coast. She started working on her book around 2017, when “there was something in the air about the need to ridicule what was happening in the real news,” she said.
That reality has persisted, and The Onion has continued to be one of its best chroniclers.
“We’re living in this world where it’s very difficult a lot of the time to [know whether] what you’re reading is real or true at all,” she said. “Going back to satire would just seem like an interesting way to kind of think about all that.”
