In early 1997, the alt-weekly in Minneapolis,
City Pages, wrote
a profile of writers at The Onion. Unless you were from the deep midwest, you likely never saw this profile, and even more likely, you didn't yet read
The Onion. But that piece has somehow become the model for an endless stream of
Onion profiles ever since. This seems to have culminated this weekend with the mother of all profiles,
a sprawling 7,000-worder in the Washington Post Magazine. If you've read the other profiles through the years, this one will reveal nothing; if you haven't, it's now the official definitive account of the paper's editorial process. (It could have dedicated some of those words to being more of
a business story.)
"The Onion is already fimoculous, which is a biological term for an organism that lives in excrement. Lives in shit, consumes shit, and extrudes it too. And the media environment, The Onion imagines, is going to get shittier before it gets cleaner."
I bought this domain immediately after that.