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Originally Posted by Lasereth
Who cares? Honestly. So they want to make money. Is there something wrong with making money? Are they still pretty funny? Yeah. This doesn't affect anything.
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They've always wanted to make money; they've always had ads. As I said up above, I have no problem with ads. But when the line between content and ads begins to get blurry - then I have a problem. For one thing, the Onion has been pretty scathing to companies before, but I'm sure Miller's PR board had to sign off on that paid article before it got published. So maybe they weren't as harsh as they could have been.
In fact, the Onion's entire writing style is built around making fun of people. Now, however, they're going to have to watch to make sure they don't tread on any toes in the paid "articles" they write. So you've almost certainly got a mellowing out of content, and some self-censorship going on. And that leads them to not be as funny any more... Even before I saw that tagline on that story, it just wasn't very good. Their content has deteriorated in general quite a bit since "Our Dumb Century", but these days it's even worse.
Think about the ads you see on TV or in print. There aren't any companies willing to be as outrageous about the things they say as the Onion was - some of their articles were pretty subversive. If they become advertisements, they're not going to be able to be subversive or outrageous any more. They'll have a little more leeway, because it's the Internet, but anything controversial that might upset Miller won't get written about.
Obviously, it's a humor paper. This isn't like the death of journalism or anything. But I think there are justifiable reasons to be unhappy with the direction of content - it's nice to have some independent sources of entertainment out there, because otherwise the only things we're exposed to represent the views of mainstream media. The Onion wrote a scathing commentary on draconian copyright enforcement a while ago - no big media company would express that view too openly because they've got too much to lose.
Anyway, it bothers me, and I sent them an email explaining why. I'm sure I'm not their target audience any more, so they probably won't pay attention, but at least I didn't go gentle into that good night.
Bingle