Two writers from “America’s finest news source” visited ASU on Tuesday to explain the inner workings of “serious journalism.”
Sam West and Dave Kornfeld, two staff writers from The Onion, visited the Tempe campus partially to inform people about the spoof newspaper, but mostly to make them laugh.
“Organizations like The Onion definitely exist primarily to make people laugh and to serve as a relief from the horrors of the real world,” said West, who writes video content.
In their presentation, West and Kornfeld had the audience laughing almost immediately, describing students as “serious scholars” and themselves as “serious journalists.”
To prove their point, they presented bar graphs showing The Onion as captivating an audience of trillions, eclipsing other news sources like The New York Times.
West and Kornfeld showed a highlight reel of The Onion’s best headlines since its beginning as a satirical newspaper at the University Wisconsin-Madison in 1988.
“Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian,” one headline read.
“Prospective Student Had Most Fun Getting Drunk at Arizona State,” another read.
Every week, The Onion writers constantly brainstorm joke headlines and pitch more than 20 at a staff meeting, but there is never any certainty that people — including colleagues — will find them funny, West said.
Kornfeld said that in person, some of The Onion writers are “extroverted, like a walking three-ring circus,” while others are plain awkward.
At their weekly meeting, the writers bounce ideas off each other and work together to flesh out their stories, Kornfeld said.
He said he likes that The Onion writers are not bound by journalistic integrity and they can cover whatever they want if it is funny enough.
Neither Kornfeld nor West ever seriously considered becoming real journalists, they said.
Steve Elliott, digital news director at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism who had a longtime career with The Associated Press, said he loves The Onion and reads it for “kicks and giggles.”
“It speaks to universal truth about the absurdities of life and completely blows them out of proportion and turns them into satire,” Elliott said.
He said he likes that writers at The Onion make clear that everything they write is satire.
“I don’t think there’s any ambiguity on the site of what they are,” Elliott said. “If somebody can’t figure out that this is satire, then they have bigger problems in their lives.”
The danger of satirical writing is when real news sources write fake articles —like some do on April Fools’ Day — and hope people understand it’s not real, he said.
There have been times when other newspapers, especially foreign papers, have run one of The Onion’s stories as fact, Kornfeld said.
He cited an example of a headline they ran, “Child Bankrupts Make-A-Wish Foundation With Wish For Unlimited Wishes.”
After the Make-A-Wish Foundation received confused and worried emails from supporters, they had to publish a statement saying the story was not true.
But generally — especially to American readers familiar with The Onion — there is no confusion that its purpose is to create humor.
The Onion, an independent organization, has never been a mouthpiece of any larger company, West said, which is one reason he likes writing for it.
Real newspapers are being bought up, changed and sold by companies, while The Onion has maintained its independence, Kornfeld said.
“As the print journalism and the classic ways are dying, we’ve been doing basically the same thing with no changes through all of this,” he said.
Reach the reporter at kkfrost@asu.edu
