No More San Francisco Edition of The Onion
It's a sad day, area men and women: Today's editions of the The Onion in San Francisco and Los Angeles will be the last. The paper was said to be laying off editors yesterday in those two cities, and the New York print edition is apparently doing only marginally better. Despite sharing their primary editorial content across every regional edition, the organization has been hit by the same forces killing off alternative weeklies and mainstream papers around the country -- craigslist classifieds, Yelp reviews, the general desire to retrieve information quickly via the web without killing tress -- and yeah, print is dead. The web arm of The Onion is sure to survive, and for now, so will regional print editions in Denver, NYC and throughout the Midwest.
We personally never understood who was turning to the locally based Onion A.V. Club for their concert listings and band interviews and we were continually surprised to find the section still appearing in the paper whenever we found a crumpled one under our seat on MUNI. But anyhow, the core writing staff won't go anywhere, so everyone can still read about murderous kittens and ironic shadow governments online. For now, we raise our glass to this headline: For Gay Couple, Fulfilling Lifelong Dream Of Marriage Not Worth Moving To Iowa
UPDATE: Company memo, after the jump.
The following memo went out to Onion employees from CEO Steve Hannah yesterday.
As most of you have heard through the very twisted grapevine by now, we have decided to shut down our print operations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Both staffs were informed in person yesterday that their last editions would be published this week. It is an unpleasant task
to discontinue print in those two cities—and to lay off the good people who worked hard to make them profitable—but I believe it is the wise business decision to make.
At the quarterly Board meeting in Chicago two weeks ago, we took a hard look at the company’s business operations in this very tough economic environment. Overall, we are weathering the storm, and, as you know, we have avoided taking many of the draconian measures employed by other media companies. Unfortunately, despite healthy
readership in both Los Angeles and San Francisco (readership has actually risen despite our reduction in copies in recent months) the advertising in both cities has been abysmal.
This stands in stark contrast to other parts of our business—both the majority of our print markets (Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Denver, Boulder, for example) as well as our rapidly growing digital enterprises (theonion.com, avclub.com, the Onion News Network and
Decider.com—which are growing nicely and in some cases dramatically. So, at the end of the day, you have to make a decision whether to pump money into parts of the company that are straining us financially (LA and SF print) or reroute that capital into the areas of the company
that are growing in size and value.
We chose the latter.
We love our print publications. They are the foundation of the Onion and, in the majority of our markets, they make us money. We have no plans at this time to cease publication in any of our other markets.