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The Onion - America's Finest News Source

www.theonion.com

The Onion is an American based fake news/parody website founded in 1988 that features satirical articles on a wide variety of news stories that is predominantly popular with 18 to 44 year olds.

The style of the website is very much like a professional news page such as CNN which provides a sense of familiarity to those who may be interested in the satirical nature of the news, with the target audience of the site being educated, politically interested individuals who would be able to understand and appreciate the content. The audience will use the stories for the comical content to fill their spare time. The audience is very narrow as The Onion is an example of narrowcasting and within this the audience is further broken down by the categories on the page, an example of audience fragmentation. The institution has taken this to their advantage, using this hugely fragmented audience to have very specific stories. For example within the ‘Election 08’ category, there is one story titled ‘Black Guy Asks Nation For Change’ whilst another is titled ‘Hillary Receives 3am Phone Call From Drunken Bill Clinton’, appealing to both sides of the Democratic voters in different ways.

The website itself contains written, video and radio links as well as Photoshopped images and an online store as different medias for the audiences to use. This also increases the ways in which the distributors of The Onion are able to reach the audiences. There is a sense that the team behind the satires are actually benefiting just as much as the audience as they are able to comically portray often serious or controversial issues. The improved technology has also led to better quality production, newer Photoshop programmes have better tools that allow for a better outcome when editing pictures for example.

The Onion is an example of narrowcasting and fragmentation of audiences as it has a very specific appeal and therefore quite a small reach – an estimated 710,000 readers a month – however there is a high quality of reporting used. The fact that everything is posted online allows a time-shift for users, they can access the content at a time convenient to them as well as looking at archived stories if they wished to.