The satirical news website The Onion, and by extension cartoonist Stan Kelly, has been sold to Global Tetrahedron.
The Onion has sold to a new Chicago-based firm called Global Tetrahedron, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller announced [in a memo] Thursday, TheWrap has learned.
TheWrap obtained Spanfeller’s memo in full below:
“As I mentioned to you last month, we have been undergoing an extensive review of our portfolio with the intention of coring down to our leading sites in terms of audience and revenues,” Spanfeller wrote in his Thursday memo. “Today we announced great traffic gains for Quartz, but also, as part of efforts to sharpen our focus, we are announcing that G/O Media has sold The Onion to a new Chicago-based firm called Global Tetrahedron. This company is made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy-based content. The site’s new owners have agreed to keep The Onion’s entire staff intact [emphasis added] and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal.”
This involves us because editorial cartoonist Stan Kelly (“The Cartoonist America Turns to”), who celebrated 50 years of cartooning in 2016, will seemingly retain his position with the paper – at least for the present.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. A G/O Media rep declined to identify the new owners of The Onion. The site, which first launched as a weekly newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wis., carries the tagline “America’s Finest News Source.”
Jeff Lawson, the cofounder of cloud computing company Twilio, appears to have purchased the satirical news website The Onion from G/O Media.
A trust linked to Lawson is behind a San Francisco-based company called Global Tetrahedron, which shares the name of a fictional evil megacorporation in a long-running Onion gag, business records show.
The Hollywood Reporter reports:
The name of the company [Global Tetrahedron], social media users pointed out on Thursday, is the same as a fictional firm that appears in The Onion’s first book, 1999’s Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source.
But The Onion itself relays information that there may be troubles ahead without our help:
Today, billions of readers like yourself navigated to The Onion seeking dispatches from America’s Finest News Source. Like so many have done through the decades, you doubtless entered the hyperlink in a glazed stupor, hoping to see reporting of grave importance. However, today, this was not to be. You see, The Onion is in our possession, and what happens next is entirely up to you.
Simply put, you must give us $1 immediately or The Onion will disappear forever.
This is no idle threat. For every hour you wait, one journalist from their stable of 37,865 reporters will be laid off. For every day that passes without a financial contribution from you, another sector of the website will go dark.
The Kelly cartoon archives at The Onion. Kartoonist Kelly cartoons can be read on Facebook and X/Twitter.
A 2016 psuedo-interview with Kelly through his spokesman Ward Sutton on the release of the anniversary book.