Correction Appended
TRANSPLANTS The Onion's address may say SoHo, but its flannel heart still says Madison, Wis. Still, its crew has embraced New York in one way, said Mike Loew, second from right. "Everyone started eating sushi and getting all svelte."
WHEN Joe Garden, the 35-year-old features editor of the satirical paper The Onion, thinks about the publication’s move five years ago this month from Madison, Wis., to New York, he thinks about his first encounter with a staff member of The New Yorker. The emissary from the sleek Condé Nast building had traveled to The Onion’s cavelike office in West Chelsea.
“She said to me, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re still wearing pleats!’” Mr. Garden recalled recently, his indignation unfaded by time. “I guess that was my introduction to provincialism.”
Still, as Mr. Garden recounted the incident, there were hints that after five years big-city life has gotten better. “Everyone else I’ve met from The New Yorker has been great,” he continued. “But that’s because we play them in softball and in bowling, and it’s mostly the cartoonists.”
And then there is Mr. Garden’s sartorial growth. “If you will notice,” he said with a cocked eyebrow, “these jeans are not pleated.” He lifted the bottom of his “Hee Haw” T-shirt to prove it.
A half-decade after The Onion landed on Manhattan’s shores, much about its 14-member staff is unchanged: Wisconsinites still predominate, and many of the writers still resemble the stoners and indie rockers the paper regularly lampoons. The 18-year-old paper is still wildly popular — more so than ever, with a circulation of 100,000 in New York alone and its 16th seventh compendium of fake newspaper articles, published by Three Rivers Press, currently in bookstores.
The paper’s Web site, which turns 10 this year, gets four million readers a month. And its minute-long daily Onion Radio News dispatches, a longtime feature on the paper’s Web site that is now in syndication, topped the list of most popular podcasts on the Apple iTunes Music Store only a week after the store began offering them for download.
For a staff that did little to discourage a thinly veiled look-at-the-rubes condescension in the news media coverage of its arrival, life is now slightly more polished. The dark office in Chelsea is gone, left behind a year ago for an airy new space in SoHo, just down Broadway from Dean & DeLuca. Its modern blue cubicles are stocked with as many PowerBooks as the Apple store a few blocks away, and the new managing editor, a 25-year-old former intern named Peter Koechley, is a Type A personality who grew up in Madison but joined the paper full time only after graduating from Columbia.
And every now and then, something happens — like an encounter with a comedy hero, or a cease-and-desist letter from the White House over the paper’s use of the presidential seal — that reminds the staff how far it has come from its scruffy comedic roots.
“It’s so funny how we’re still using it,” Todd Hanson, the head writer, mused about the letter from the White House, which involved the presence of the seal on a Web page parodying President Bush’s weekly radio address. “Did we even get a follow-up letter about that?”
Mr. Garden, meanwhile, has launched a grass-roots campaign to become the next host of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” complete with Web site, brochures and a slogan (“Hasn’t Carson Daly had enough shows?”), and cultivated his entrepreneurial spirit by buying cases of soda at the Costco in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and reselling them to co-workers at a modest markup.
He lives in Windsor Terrace, near several other Onion writers, who say that the neighborhoods around Prospect Park, with their greenery and college-town pace, remind them of Madison.
There are other reminders of their roots. “I have clogged arteries and a bad heart from all the cheese I ate living in Wisconsin, all the fat that I crammed down my throat,” Mr. Garden said, tapping his chest. “So that’s part of me. You can’t remove it, or it will destroy me.”
In fact, the absence of solid Midwestern comfort food has posed a challenge for the paper’s art department, which requires a certain girthiness of many of the people who pose for the fake news photos.
