Onion, The Beginning

A web site was created in 1996, it's full name is "The Onion". It is known as an entertainment newspaper, intentionally written with satire. It purpose was to be funny.y and advertised so. It took right off, mostly through, word of mouth. They also purported a much older founding."

"Officially, the paper purports to be over 250 years old, having originally published in the mid 18th century. It was named the "Mercantile Onion" because those were the only two English words the paper's immigrant founder, Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, knew at the time. (Zwiebel is German for "onion".) The newspaper's motto was originally Tu Stultus Es (Latin for "You are stupid"). Reported by Wikipedia.

As the Onion gained popularity, newspaper readers were reading less of the paper. A switch was starting, that began to worry the newspapers. Not only the newspapers were being affected, but also News Magazines. At first they thought it was some sort of bubble, that would burst, and all would return to normal.

It was not a bubble, and by the time they accept that idea, it was almost too late. Some reporters compared this bubble burst, to the fall of IBM. If you remember, it was the time small personal computers came into being. IBM waited too long to recognize what was happening, and the mighty IBM fell, replaced by Microsoft.

Newspaper started testing some of the ideas "The Onion" created. They started very small, with stories that were given catchy titles. The real story was changed slightly to include the reports wit. There were no complaints, printed a few more doctored stories and circulation started to rise. Soon, the readership of The Onion began to fall. The Onion realized that the only way to keep up was to put in language that was inappropriate. The problem has escalated, and here we are.