The Uncanny Valley Interview: Ben Collins on Reviving The Onion, Standing Up to Power, and His Balatro Addiction
Ben Collins made a bold gamble. One year ago, just months after stepping into the CEO role at satirical institution The Onion, he pulled off a surprising move: he brought back its print edition. A once-beloved staple on college campuses across the U.S., The Onion had not printed a physical issue since 2013. Conventional industry wisdom held that there was no longer enough reader demand or ad revenue to support a print newspaper. But Collins, a lifelong fan of the satirical brand, saw that conventional wisdom as nonsense.
Readers immediately embraced the print relaunch, relishing the chance to flip through The Onion’s sharp, biting headlines on a full broadsheet. One of the relaunch’s earliest iconic headlines? “I Was Honored to Die So the Print Edition of ‘The Onion’ Could Live,” credited to one A. Tree.
Collins declined to share exact current subscriber numbers for the print edition, but confirms the count is more than enough to keep the outlet’s writing team operating steadily (weeks after this episode was recorded, the Wall Street Journal reported The Onion now counts more than 53,000 paying print subscribers). In this episode of Uncanny Valley, host Katie Drummond sits down with Collins to discuss his vision for The Onion, the future of independent journalism, and his very unhealthy obsession with indie hit game Balatro.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Do you have a recent favorite Onion headline? What’s stood out to you lately?
BEN COLLINS: I have so many. There’s that Ghislaine Maxwell blood splatter one — let me pull it up for you.
Go right ahead.
“Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help but Notice Interview Room Covered in Plastic Sheeting.”
The team cranks out 15 great headlines a day, no joke. I sit there every day and I still can’t figure out how they pull it off. When I say they throw away 8 or 9 perfectly great lines every day that most writers would kill to call their own, I mean that completely. These are just incredibly prolific, unbelievably talented comedy writers.
We’re kicking off with a quick warm-up: I’ll ask a few short questions, you give quick answers. Ready?
Let’s do it.
What does the algorithm know about you?
Way too much. And most of it’s wrong. I wish my actual net worth was what the algorithm thinks it is.
What piece of tech do you wish existed that doesn’t right now?
Have you seen the horror movie It Follows?
I haven’t actually — fill me in.
It’s a horror flick intentionally set in no specific time period, and there’s this clamshell device in it that works as an e-reader. That’s exactly the speed of tech I want. Everyone should look it up, it’s great.
Then there’s disinformation reporter Jane Lytvynenko, who says Atlantic sharks should eat all the undersea internet cables connecting the web across the ocean. That’s the tech I want. I want a shark that…
…eats the internet.
Exactly. Shuts the whole thing down.
What app are you ashamed to be obsessed with, after this podcast blows up?
Balatro.
What is that?
Oh my god, it’s this game made by one guy who had no idea he created something that makes time just disappear entirely. It’s like poker with extra incentives, and I don’t even like poker. It won Indie Game of the Year, for good reason.
Last July, I was in the middle of taking over The Onion and moving houses, all that chaos, and someone told me to download it. I was about to get in the shower, I downloaded it and started playing, and when I looked up two hours had gone by — and the shower was still running. I turned the shower off and kept playing, left my phone in the other room. Another two hours pass, I go check my phone and it’s completely flooded with texts. I thought someone in my family had died. Turns out Donald Trump had been shot in the ear.
No way.
I swear. I’m pretty sure half the people texting thought I had something to do with it, since I wasn’t answering.
They thought you did it, because you went radio silent.
Yep. So Balatro is the answer.
Who or what is your hate follow?
I try not to do it anymore, it just makes me miserable. It used to be that guy Nick Adams, but now he’s Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Malaysia.
That tracks for Trump’s America, honestly. All your hate follows end up in senior government positions. Alright, Ben, let’s get into the real questions. You became CEO of The Onion in April 2024. How would you rate your first year-plus on the job out of 10? What’s been the best part, and what’s been the hardest?
I’m gonna be that guy: the staff deserves a 10, I deserve a 4. That’s pretty much how it shakes out. I just did the obvious stuff, right? I came to a place famous for being a fake newspaper, so I brought back the fake newspaper. I set totally impossible deadlines, and the team pulled it off. I’m just average at pretty much everything, but that average perspective let me see what most people already think The Onion is and should be.
When we got here, the website was just absolutely flooded with gross spam ads for male enhancement pills, and we’d had enough of that.
How much revenue were those ads bringing in? Even if you can’t share exact numbers, what share of your income did they make up?
Around 70% of total revenue.
No way!
That’s what private equity ownership does. And I get it, from their perspective: there’s a real level of instability when you cut off that constant, easy revenue stream that’s basically a slot machine running in the background. Those male enhancement ads made up 70% of revenue, topping out at a couple million dollars a year max. But the entire site was covered in them, and it ruined the comedy. The previous ownership wasn’t leaning into what The Onion does best. So we just turned all those ads off and said: we won’t make any money for a month, we have initial funding to keep us going while we get the print edition off the ground.
Then we got lucky with timing: the Democratic National Convention was in Chicago, where we’re based, so the entire national political press and the whole country was focused on Chicago anyway, especially with a brand new presidential nominee. To pull off the relaunch then, we had to figure out everything from scratch. People call it building a new tech stack, but really we had to invent a whole new business. We had to figure out how to print newspapers in 2024, for god’s sake.
I was gonna ask about the logistical nightmare of restarting a print newspaper in 2024.
A huge help for us was that we were just too naive to know any better. We didn’t even know there were middlemen who could do this for us, so we just built the whole operation ourselves.
There’s a print shop near O’Hare Airport called Topweb that prints Spanish-language daily papers and coupon books, basically. They’d just bought this huge, old-fashioned traditional newspaper press at a steep discount from somewhere in Switzerland, and it was exactly the size we needed. So we got really lucky there. We also had to build a whole new website, because the old one ran on Kinja, the CMS from the old Gawker network.
Oh, I know all too well how bad Kinja is.
It was a total chaotic, frantic rush, but we launched the new website and the print edition between the last week of April and the first week of August.
That’s an insanely fast timeline to overhaul both your business model and all your distribution systems at the same time.
From the outside, you seem like the kind of CEO your employees actually love. So many people in newsrooms — both straight news and satire — look at what you’ve done with a lot of admiration. But what makes you hard to work with? What do you do that drives the staff crazy?
The same things that make me good at this job also make me bad at it. I’ve got that obsessive newsroom brain that’s just like, “We have to get this done in two months or it’s over.”
We’re working on a project coming out next month that’s one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done, and I told them it has to be done by the end of August. They should be throwing stuff at me. They should pick up hammers and throw them at my head, honestly.
You relaunched print, you launched a paid membership program, you overhauled your ad strategy, you brought video operations back. What’s your big-picture strategy for The Onion, both as a business and as an editorial outlet?
We’re in a really unique position right now — and you guys at WIRED are too, I think we’re kindred spirits in this. For big legacy media outlets, the current incentive structure pushes them to cave, fall in line, protect access, not ruffle the administration’s feathers too much. We’re the exact opposite, and that’s helped us enormously both as a business and as people.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can deliver truth-telling and catharsis right now. We can be silly when no one else dares to be. Everything shifted after the 2024 election. I never expected everyone to just fold that fast. Did you expect so many outlets to just cave immediately?
I didn’t. I’m Canadian, so maybe I’m naive. When we started reporting on DOGE and the new administration, I remember after a week looking around thinking, “Wait, did I miss an editor’s memo? Are we the ones doing something wrong here? Why isn’t anyone else covering this? This is so weird.”
Other outlets eventually picked up the story, but for a minute it felt really lonely, and really risky from a security perspective, that no one else was jumping in full force.
At WIRED, we knew this was the moment to go all in. And what I’ve seen from The Onion is that you’ve had this huge groundswell of support, right? We saw the same thing here. Doing good journalism and telling the truth is actually good for business.
It absolutely is good for business, and it insulates you from so many other pressures. Advertisers do come to us wanting to be part of what we’re doing. They might not shout it from the rooftops, but they do.
That’s where the actual audience is — it’s not with the fascists pushing extreme agendas. All the big billionaire money wants to align culture with their interests, but that’s not where actual people are. People hate this garbage.
We saw that really quickly, right after the election when Infowars went up for auction eight days later.
Walk us back a little for context.
Infowars was put up for auction after Alex Jones was ordered to pay over a billion dollars in damages to the Sandy Hook families, whom he defamed by lying that the shooting was a hoax. The whole operation, including the supplement line Jones sells, was up for sale, and we decided to put in a bid.
No way.
No one knew which way the wind was blowing back then. Even that first week after the election, everyone was just hunkering down, battening the hatches, getting ready to ride out four years of fascism. We had to take a risk to bid, and we won. Then the judge took it away from us, because he was also scared of what was going on. He basically threw out 18 months of prior court rulings. I get it, I would be spooked too.
Think about it: people like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, now top administration officials, got their start on Infowars. It was a feeder system for this White House. So being scared of it makes sense. But it just proves that standing your ground, both as a business and as a person, matters so much right now.
Got it. Just to clarify: are you still working to acquire the Infowars supplement line?
Yeah. I still don’t know what I’d do with them if we get them, but we’re absolutely still trying. We have a whole plan for Infowars if we end up getting it.
You know what? I interviewed Bryan Johnson, he has a whole supplement business, maybe he’d take it off your hands.
Yeah, we’re basically the same person.
Going back to Infowars: you know this murky world better than most, right? You used to cover disinformation as a reporter, so you’ve seen firsthand how the internet turned into a cesspool of conspiracy, bad faith, and AI-generated garbage. How has that experience shaped what you see as The Onion’s role? You don’t publish straight facts, after all, but how do you fit into this messy landscape as a force for good?
Anyone who covered disinformation for a living watched the web and the free flow of information degrade as billionaires and bad actors slowly took over. There were a few big turning points, and Elon Musk buying Twitter was probably the biggest one.
The reason I was in such a rush to buy The Onion was that I wanted to protect this one thing that mattered so much to me. The Onion was my favorite thing growing up, full stop. It was my favorite outlet. It taught me to love dumb jokes, spot nefarious behavior, and it shaped my humanist political outlook.
You were a print Onion kid growing up?
Absolutely. I grew up kind of out in the woods, and every time we went into Boston I’d come home with a stack of issues.
It was your thing.
Yeah. It gave me permission to think critically about the world. When I found out it was for sale, and I knew it could end up in really bad hands, I went all in immediately. I did everything I could to save it. I don’t know where it would be if someone else bought it. Probably full of weird AI-generated headlines, they’d fire all the staff, all that garbage. I just couldn’t let that happen.
You had a pretty messy split from your previous employer NBC, and I don’t want to drag you into bashing them, but you’d basically said you were done with journalism, then came back in a huge way.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’m so lucky I got to pull this off.
What I saw happening in traditional journalism is this constant capitulation, avoiding pissing off rich people who have big stakes in your ad revenue and your 401(k)s. I don’t know what was going on at NBC, there are good people who work there, but there was clearly so much outside pressure. Linda Yaccarino was selling all our ads there, I got suspended for being too tough on Elon Musk, and two and a half months later she became CEO of Twitter. It’s not hard to connect the dots. The whole thing was just gross, to be honest. I had a year left on my contract, and I knew 10 months before it ended I wasn’t coming back. So I just…
You went for it.
A really weird thing happened: I won the Walter Cronkite Award, which is so ridiculous that they gave it to me.
No, it’s a huge honor!
It’s a great award, but it was ridiculous they gave it to me. I gave this whole speech about why you shouldn’t capitulate. I said, “Halfway between a powerful person’s lie and the truth is just half a lie.” I was talking about Elon and Trump. I knew going into it that this would end my TV career. The second I gave that speech, it was over. I knew I’d get called into the boss’s office, and that happened within three days.
You actually got called in over that speech?
Yeah. I was in the principal’s office constantly at NBC.
The thing is, at The Onion, we’re allowed to say more true things than I ever could at a place like NBC. My whole job is just clearing a path for the writers to do that. That’s all I do. I’m just a weed whacker, cutting down all the garbage that gets in the way of powerful people stopping them from saying what they want to say.
Let’s talk about your partner in this, Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilio. He’s not gonna hear this, so you can say whatever you want. A year in, what’s he been like as an owner?
Jeff is amazing.
Is he involved in day to day operations?
Not on the editorial side at all. He has tons of C-suite experience, he ran this huge sprawling tech company. He’s always telling us that focus matters. If we’re off experimenting with some random side project like building a grain silo or something, he’ll be like, “You guys run a newspaper, what the hell are you doing?” But he’s never once touched our editorial direction. It’d be hilarious if he waltzed into the writers’ room and was like, “You’re making fun of Nvidia today.”
By 2025 media standards, that makes him pretty exceptional. We’ve got Jeff Lawson at The Onion, Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post, Marc Benioff at Time. Why do these wealthy tech founders want to become media barons? What makes Jeff Lawson’s motives different from someone like Bezos, who’s dismantling one of the most famous news institutions in the country?
First of all, The Onion is 500 times bigger than The Washington Post, we have 500,000 employees across the globe. So that’s one big difference.
(For context, Collins is joking. The Onion has a total staff of around 25 people.)
Twenty-five, yeah, that’s obviously the big scale difference. But the core difference is that Jeff just bought something that was already great, and he’s letting it be great. That’s a statement in itself. Not going in and ruining something good is actually brave. He doesn’t come in and start rambling about woke cancel culture or forcing some new agenda. Just stepping back and letting the outlet do what it does well is a zig when everyone else is zagging. I’m not saying we don’t need to push forward — we had to push hard to bring back print, and we’re planning our next big move. But all the good ideas come from the writers, not from the top down. It’s bottom-up. That’s the big difference. What’s going on at
