"MEDIA TALK; Bulletin! Washington Post Decides to Go for the Satirical." by Matthew Healey

Healey, Matthew. "MEDIA TALK; Bulletin! Washington Post Decides to Go for the Satirical." New York Times (2007): n. pag. Web. 1 Jul 2010.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E5DD1F30F931A15752C0A9619C8B63

Matthew Healey’s 2007 article in The New York Times addresses the fact that The Washington Post began distributing copies of and displaying advertising for The Onion alongside its own circulation. The article editorializes the news source’s joining forces with the satirical paper in order to further its own business. Healey explores the ways in which both papers would benefit by their joint efforts ( thanks to the widely accepted differing agendas and audience effects), and primarily focuses on the economic factors key to the story.

Healey’s article may only approach the business motives of The Onion, but what becomes fully obvious is that the readership of the satirical publication grows with each day, and will continue to do so. The tremendous outreach of such a successful mock news source shows that readers are developing sophistication in their information-seeking preferences, and it also shows that readers easily identify the rhetoric that creates irony. Further exposure to this style of humor shows an extension of audiences into a deeper intellectual realm created by the construction of careful wit and sarcasm, and The Onion is clear evidence of such.