The A.V. Club is an online newspaper[2] and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. The A.V. Club was created in 1993 as a supplement to its satirical parent publication, The Onion. While it was a part of The Onion's 1996 website launch, The A.V. Club had minimal presence on the website at that point.
A 2005 website redesign placed The A.V. Club in a more prominent position, allowing its online identity to grow. Unlike The Onion, The A.V. Club and other sites owned by G/O Media are not satirical.[3] The publication's name is a reference to audiovisual (AV) clubs typical of American high schools.[4]
G/O Media sold The A.V. Club in March 2024 to Paste Magazine. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.[5]
"A.V. Club" is for "audiovisual club". In the United States in the late 20th century, many high schools would have clubs for students who wanted to use and learn about speakers, projectors, and other early video and audio equipment.[7]
In 1996, both The Onion and The A.V. Club debuted on the Internet.[8]The A.V. Club was originally a subsection[9] of the main theonion.com domain name.[citation needed]
The supplement was moved to its own domain name, theavclub.com,[10] before the 2005 acquisition of the shorter avclub.com domain name.[11] The latter change coincided with a redesign that incorporated reader comments and blog content. In 2006, the website shifted its content model again to add content on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. Some contributors have become established as freelance writers and editors.[citation needed]
In December 2004, Stephen Thompson left his position as founding editor of The A.V. Club.[12]
According to Sean Mills, then-president of The Onion, the A.V. Club website first reached more than 1 million unique visitors in October 2007.[13] In late 2009, the website was reported to have received more than 1.4 million unique visitors and 75,000 comments per month.[14]
At its peak, the print version of The A.V. Club was available in 17 different cities.[15] Localized sections of the website were also maintained, with reviews and news relevant to specific cities. The print version and localized websites were gradually discontinued, and in December 2013, print publication ceased production in the last three markets.[16]
2012–2014 staff departures
On 13 December 2012, long-time writer and editor Keith Phipps, who oversaw the website after Stephen Thompson left, stepped down from his role as editor of The A.V. Club. He said, "Onion, Inc. and I have come to a mutual parting of the ways."[17][18][19]
On 2 April 2013, long-time film editor and critic Scott Tobias stepped down as film editor of The A.V. Club. He said via Twitter, "After 15 great years @theavclub, I step down as Film Editor next Friday."[20]
On 26 April 2013, long-time writers Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, and Genevieve Koski announced they would also be leaving the website to begin work on a new project with Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps.[21] Koski also said that she would continue to write freelance articles.[22] Writer Noel Murray announced he would be joining their new project, but would also continue to contribute to The A.V. Club in a reduced capacity.[21] On 30 May 2013, those six writers were announced as becoming part of the senior staff of The Dissolve, a film website run by Pitchfork Media.[23]
In April and June 2014, senior staff writers Kyle Ryan, Sonia Saraiya, and Emily St. James[24] left the website for positions at Entertainment Weekly, Salon, and Vox Media, respectively.[25][26] In 2015, Ryan returned to Onion, Inc. for a position in development.[27] Following his departure from The Dissolve earlier that month, Nathan Rabin returned to write freelance for the A.V. Club website in May 2015.[28] He renewed his regular column "My World of Flops"Archived 6 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine . The Dissolve folded in July 2015.[29]
Television series
On 16 February 2017, The A.V. Club's editor-at-large, John Teti, posted an article on the website announcing the upcoming release of a television series, titled The A.V. Club, based on the website.[30] The series, hosted by Teti, began airing on Fusion on 16 March 2017 and ran for one season.[31] The series featured news, criticism, and discussions about various popular-culture topics and featured staff members from the website.
The site was subsequently migrated from Bulbs, an internal content management system developed by Onion Inc. to the Gawker-developed Kinja platform.[34][35] It deleted the comment section and audience reviews hosted on the previous site. In July 2018, Univision announced it was looking for a buyer for the entire Gizmodo Group.[36]
In April 2019, Gizmodo and The Onion were sold to private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, which combined them into a new company named G/O Media.[37] In July 2019, executive editor Laura M. Browning and managing editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog left.[38] In early 2020, former People magazine and Entertainment Weekly editor Patrick Gomez was named editor-in-chief, and it was announced that the site was opening a Los Angeles bureau.[39] In August 2021, Yahoo! Entertainment and E! Online alum Scott Robson joined to lead the team.[40]
Onion Inc. Union
In March 2018 the employees of the company announced they had unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East.[41] The union comprises "all of the creative staffs at Onion Inc.: The A.V. Club, The Onion, ClickHole, The Takeout, Onion Labs, and Onion Inc.'s video and art departments."[42] (ClickHole was subsequently acquired by Cards Against Humanity in February 2020.[43]) The union was recognized on 20 April 2018[44] and reached a contract agreement with management on 20 December 2018.[44] The contract includes "annual pay increases, minimum pay grades, strong diversity and anti-harassment language, just cause, union security, editorial independence, intellectual property rights, and an end to permalancers."[45]
2022 closure of Chicago office and staff departures
On 18 January 2022, the union representing staff at the website announced that all seven staff members based in Chicago had taken severance as opposed to accepting a mandatory move of work location to Los Angeles.[46] This predominantly affected the senior staff of the site and comprised the managing editor, film editor, TV editor, associate editor, senior writer, assistant editor, and editorial coordinator.[47]
Controversy
On 9 December 2010, the website ComicsComicsMag revealed a capsule review for the book Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth had been fabricated. The book had not yet been published nor even completed by the authors.[48] After the review was removed, editor Keith Phipps posted an apology on the website, stating that the reporter being assigned to review the book could not locate a copy of it ("for obvious reasons"), so they fabricated it.[49] Leonard Pierce, the author of the review, was terminated from his freelance role with the website.[50]
Awards
In 2017, The A.V. Club won an Eisner Award for "Best Comics-related Periodical/Journalism" (for works published in 2016).[51] The award went to writers Oliver Sava, Caitlin Rosberg, Shea Hennum, and Tegan O'Neil. The award also went to editor Caitlin PenzeyMoog.[52]
A.V. Club year-end and decade-end lists
Starting in 1999, only lists written by individual writers were published. Beginning in 2006, The A.V. Club began publishing website-consensus, year-end album and film rankings, together with lists created by individual writers. Additionally decade-end lists were published for the 2000s and 2010s.[53][54]
The Onion is an American digital media company and newspaper organization that publishes satirical articles on international, national, and local news. The company is based in Chicago but originated as a weekly print publication on August 29, 1988, in Madison, Wisconsin. The Onion began publishing online in early 1996. In 2007, they began publishing satirical news audio and video online as the Onion News Network. In 2013, The Onion ceased publishing its print edition and launched Onion Labs, an advertising agency.
Gawker was an American blog founded by Nick Denton and Elizabeth Spiers that was based in New York City and focused on celebrities and the media industry. According to SimilarWeb, the site had over 23 million visits per month as of 2015. Founded in 2002, Gawker was the flagship blog for Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker Media also managed other blogs such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Kotaku.
Gawker Media LLC was an American online media company and blog network. It was founded by Nick Denton in October 2003 as Blogwire, and was based in New York City. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, as of 2012, Gawker Media was the parent company for seven different weblogs and many subsites under them: Gawker.com, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel. All Gawker articles are licensed on a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial license. In 2004, the company renamed from Blogwire, Inc. to Gawker Media, Inc., and to Gawker Media LLC shortly after.
Kinja is a free online news aggregator, launched in April 2004. It is operated by G/O Media. It was formerly operated by Gizmodo Media Group, which was purchased by Univision Communications during Gawker Media's bankruptcy.
Kotaku is a video game website and blog that was originally launched in 2004 as part of the Gawker Media network. Notable former contributors to the site include Luke Smith, Cecilia D'Anastasio, Tim Rogers, and Jason Schreier.
Paste is an American monthly music and entertainment digital magazine, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with studios in Atlanta and Manhattan, and owned by Paste Media Group. The magazine began as a website in 1998. It ran as a print publication from 2002 to 2010 before converting to online-only.
James Joseph Mallon is an American television and film producer and writer, most notable for being executive producer of the Peabody Award-winning series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). He is also president of the series' original production company, Best Brains, Inc., directed more than 75 episodes of MST3K, and played the role of Gypsy from the first season until Jack Frost in the middle of the eighth season.
Deadspin is a sports blog founded by Will Leitch in 2005 and based in Chicago. Previously owned by Gawker Media, Univision Communications and G/O Media, it was sold to Lineup Publishing in March 2024.
Gizmodo is a design, technology, science and science fiction website. It was originally launched as part of the Gawker Media network run by Nick Denton, and runs on the Kinja platform. Gizmodo also includes the sub-blogs io9 and Earther, which focus on pop-culture and environmentalism respectively. Since April 2019, Gizmodo is part of G/O Media, owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners.
TelevisaUnivision is a Mexican-American media company headquartered in New York and Mexico City that owns American Spanish language broadcast network Univision and free-to-air channels in Mexico such as Las Estrellas, Canal 5, Foro, and NU9VE alongside a collection of specialty television channels and production studios. 45% of the company is held by the Mexican telecommunications and broadcasting company Grupo Televisa, which was a major programming partner for Univision until the company sold their content assets to Univision in 2022.
Jezebel is a US-based website featuring news and cultural commentary geared towards women. It was launched in 2007 by Gawker Media under the editorship of Anna Holmes as a feminist counterpoint to traditional women's magazines.
Nathan Rabin is an American film and music critic. Rabin was the first head writer for The A.V. Club, a position he held until he left the Onion organization in 2013. In 2013, Rabin became a staff writer for The Dissolve, a film website operated by Pitchfork Media. Two of his featured columns at The Dissolve were "Forgotbusters" and "Streaming University".
Yana Gorskaya is a Russian-American director, producer and film editor. She is best known for her work as director and co-executive producer of the TV series What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and her work in the editorial departments of nearly all of director Taika Waititi’s films, including Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016),Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Jojo Rabbit (2019) and the feature version of What We Do in the Shadows (2014).
El Rey Network is a media brand founded by Robert Rodriguez on December 15, 2013, that is currently owned in a joint venture with FactoryMade Ventures.
The Dissolve was a film review, news, and commentary website which was operated by Pitchfork and based in Chicago, Illinois. The site was focused on reviews, commentary, interviews, and news about contemporary and classic films. Its editor was Scott Tobias, the former editor in chief of The A.V. Club. Editorial director Keith Phipps announced The Dissolve's closure on July 8, 2015.
"The Red Throne" is the forty-seventh episode of the fifth season of the American animated television series Adventure Time. The episode was storyboarded by Seo Kim and Somvilay Xayaphone, from a story by Kent Osborne, Pendleton Ward, Jack Pendarvis, and Adam Muto. It originally aired on Cartoon Network on February 10, 2014.
The Fusion Media Group is a division of Univision Communications. The company was launched in April 2016 after Univision bought out Disney's stake in Fusion through the Fusion Media Network joint venture between Univision & Disney-ABC. While Univision is focused on serving Hispanic America in Spanish, FMG is the company's multi-platform, English language division targeting young adults.
Gizmodo Media Group was an online media company and blog network formerly operated by Univision Communications in its Fusion Media Group division. The company was created from assets acquired from Gawker Media during its bankruptcy in 2016. In April 2019, Gizmodo and The Onion were sold to private equity firm Great Hill Partners, which combined them into a new company named G/O Media.
G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that owns and operates several digital media outlets, including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, The Root, The Onion, The Inventory, and Quartz.
James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American executive known for running Forbes.com from 2001–2009. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. He is also a past Chairman of the IAB and longtime executive board member of Digital Content Next (DCN).
↑ "The ONION, Number One in News". 19 December 1996. Archived from the original on 19 December 1996. Retrieved 19 July 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
↑ "Home | The A.V. Club". The A.V. Club. 6 August 2005. Archived from the original on 6 August 2005. Retrieved 13 August 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
↑ "Awards: 2010-Present". Comic-Con. San Diego Comic Convention. 2 December 2012. Archived from the original on 13 February 2014. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
