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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.
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Actually, I thought some of their local music coverage was better than SF Weekly or the SFBG. They had writers who actually seemed to know something about the bands they were writing about.
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This is a sad day! I looked forward to my walk to work every Wednesday when I picked up a few copies for our office. I read them on my smoke break! I kept track of the comedy club listings! And I enjoyed their AV Club write-ups as well.
This sucks. Where am I supposed to go for my free, written comedy? The letters to the editors in the SFBG just don't do it for me anymore.
Good luck out there, recently laid-off The Onion editors and sales staff!
yeah, are you kidding? the onion's event listings are/were far and away better than either the BG or SFW. it was my calendar of choice, but oh well. i don't expect the weekly or guardian to change in response, so looks like I'm back in sucktown.
and for interviews? please. guardian and weekly writers might as well be from sj metro or salinas or wherever. that is, it always seems to be more about the writer than the band.
this is a sad day. and I agree, the onion calendar listings actually represented a city that had some culture in it, unlike the guardian's listings which barely exist, and the weekly's listings which dont exist at all. hopefully the remaining print media will use this an opportunity to actually support local arts.
agree with the comments above. They recently branded their events listings "The Decider" and it got even better.
I was so thrilled when the print edition came to SF because referring friends to jokes that you can only see online is kind of, well, unrewarding. "I saw something funny on the internet" is sort of a conversation killer. It's much easier to just hand the paper to someone and say "did you see this?"
I just read the Gawker article and it predicted that the Decider info will continue via their website.
http://sanfrancisco.decider.com/
Damn! This news ruined my day.
The print edition of the Onion kept me happy on long Muni-rides, gave my coworkers and I few chuckles on our Thursday lunches, and, most importantly, had a long and happy afterlife on our apartment's bathroom shelf. For *some* places, paper still trumps laptops or clicking around the screen of a PDA.
I know... it's totally fucked. This was the best weekly.
Oh no. Area city hall employee mourns the death of the onion and revealed Tuesday "Each week on my lunch break, picking up the onion supplemented my meager existence." He reported that the soul-crushing work-a-day schedule "garnered a shred of meaning for about a half an hour on Thursdays." Area man also reported that Weekly and Guardian entertainment listings totally blow, and the Onion was the only outlet to report that Flipper show at El Rio and the Mayyors/Nodzzz/Oh Sees show last week, both of which totally rocked.
scratch that... the ONLY weekly worth reading.
Actually, Andy, SFBG listed the Flipper show here:
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=8406
and Thee Oh Sees show here:
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/music/2009/04/hark_thee_oh_sees_mayyors_and.html
The Onion listings were really the only local part, and I really enjoyed the AV Club as well -- great talent there (love Andy Battaglia). It'll all survive online. It's just really funny to me how people like Jay keep saying paper is dying, but the Web is thriving -- without acknowledging that actually all the alternative "papers" in town have very active Web sites. A tad contradictory.
"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."
You can't be serious..
Until the local Onion came along, the only reason to pick up either the Guardian or Weekly was the local music and film coverage. Since the Onion, they've both become moot points unless you appreciate their ad nauseam onslaught of seemingly-benevolent-project-gone-bad exposes. ("It might look like a homeless shelter from the outside, but did you know that [name of organization] supports [some or another totalitarian regime in Central America]?" etc.) Give me a fucking break.
I'm wondering how they manage to keep publishing print editions in Milwaukee or Denver but they can't afford to out here? Is the advertising market out here that much worse than in Denver? Or does having so many other free weeklies in the area (SFBG, SF Weekly, East Bay Express, the Examiner, etc.) drain the pool of local advertisers?
I really haven't cared much about the demise of the newspaper industry, but THIS! This is sad.
boo to this. The website is blocked at my office ("forbidden category: humor/jokes" I kid you not). So the print edition is what got my through the humorless days.
Crap! It beats the hell out of the other comedy paper (The Chronicle).
I don't see why they can't make it. They always had plenty of ads.
RIP the American Apparel ads! Where better to get softcore porn than the Onion's back cover?
A: the Guardian's back cover.
I always preferred to read the Onion in print, oddly enough. Especially, as others have said, because of the excellent local events coverage. I mean, yeah, the A/V Club is always better online and with more content, but it was just a much better and more enjoyable product in print. Plus we got stories a few days before they were posted online.