Dying is easy, the old saw goes, but comedy is hard.
That idea is being turned on its head as The Onion has decided to go online.
The Onion, a satirical fake-news website that has offered up a lot of smirks and giggles if not outright belly laughs, is launching an online version of its pseudo-newspaper format, a news program with an anchor (Michele Ammon, an actress who plays the newsreader Jean Anne Wharton, pictured at left). The Onion News Network will start as two video clips per week, and move on from there.
The Onion has every reason to be confident about the venture — its website has been wildly successful, it has met success in book publishing (The Onion's Finest News Reporting, Volume I, from Random House) and even printed weekly newspapers distributed in 10 markets.
Sean Mills, the president of the company that runs The Onion, is a little wary of YouTube, but hopes to make a deal with that video portal in the future — in the meantime, he of course will not be opposing anyone who posts ONN clips on Youtube.
The Onion is making this steady climb to success look easy. And the lesson here is that it can do this because it’s small.
You can argue that the anarchic nature of The Onion’s satire is what gives it traction in the online community, but I won’t buy that. There are a lot of good content providers out there, humorous or otherwise, who could also capitalize on expanding their Web content.
The problem is that most are huge, monolithic empires, and have unspeakably huge investments in the way they currently do business, and would have to set in motion the wheels of a monstrous machine before they could make a daring move like The Onion is doing. For these leviathans, it’s much easier to send the lawyers out waving writs and threatening to sue for copyright infringement, which everyone knows is a delaying action until they can figure out how to go online themselves.
Here I’m thinking of Viacom, the owner of a bunch of TV stations, including the Comedy Network, which is suing Youtube for $1-billion for copyright violations; In the meantime, the Fox Network and NBC are going into business together to start a video-posting website to challenge YouTube's domination.
Between them, Fox and NBC have a lot of good content. But what they have that Viacom doesn’t have is the will to do something as hard..
