Area Man Realizes He's Been Reading Fake News For 25 Years

You might think this is a headline from the Onion, but it's from NPR. It's a headline about the Onion, which is 25 years old today! The satirical newspaper started out small, and now has the newspaper, a popular website, and the Onion News Network video series.

Two college students founded the fake news organization, which began as a newspaper in Madison, Wis. "It really started as something very local that was intended mainly to ... sell pizza coupons," Editor-in-Chief Will Tracy tells Morning Edition host Renee Montagne..

It still has that Midwestern touch, he says.

"We still have a lot of Midwesterners writing for us, and I do think that there is a distinctly Midwestern aesthetic and voice to the paper," Tracy says. "It's sort of an unflashy, flat, unpretentious sort of voice that we have."

Part of that regional bent comes through in The Onion's daily-life humor and its stories about "Area Man" (who Tracy says seems to be a Midwesterner).

Read more about growing the Onion at NPR.