In our conversation last week, we discussed all that and more: the limitations of traditional media; the state of the internet; his aggressive pursuit of Alex Jones’s InfoWars, which the company acquired earlier this year; and finding peace in a post-journalism life. As usual, the following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julia Alexander: Your decision to walk away from the disinformation beat always made sense to me; I remember thinking you’d eventually burn out having to write about the worst corners of the internet all day. But how did you get from there to running a media company?

Ben Collins: My job had basically been criminalized. Everyone I know with that job either changed beats or got laid off, because you were flying too close to the sun—reporting on people with powerful interests in everyone’s 401(k)s—the Elon Musk or Alex Karp types. Those people didn’t get appropriate scrutiny because they were too big to fail, and they went after journalists, researchers, and students. It was Red Scare–style, McCarthyist stuff. If you’re not allowed to cover the most important thing happening, are you even allowed to report at all?

I didn’t want to go independent, either. I watched people leave, lose an editor, and become total insane cranks, and I didn’t want that to be my life. I was writing a book that was very first-person-heavy and having a miserable time.

You pivoted completely from being a reporter to becoming C.E.O. of a 37-year-old publication. Why did you think you could pull it off?

Honestly, white guy confidence. I thought, How hard could this be? Of course, that’s what people say right before they blow their own face off with a firework, but it’s the same energy. I called everyone I knew who’d started or fundraised for a company before—though nobody I knew had done a takeover like this. I just like zagging, really going for it, and I like a dare. When people tell me I can’t do something, that motivates me.

Also, at the time, The Onion was one of the only outlets speaking plainly about Palestine, and about artificial intelligence. Newsrooms either weren’t allowed to say things plainly or were too tired to. We were all tired. I wanted to be a part of something that had energy and was willing to say things plainly.

The Onion also has a true sense of community and fandom. You brought back the print paper and you have about 81,000 subscribers. How do you think about maintaining that fandom, and building that audience? I hate to bring up events, but it’s the only conversation these days.

Our oyster is wide open. We’re planning a bowl game this year, and lots of stuff in real physical space. I’m sure a streamer could offer us the right amount of money, but I don’t want to sacrifice this moment—we’re in a really charmed era. We want to be everywhere: Twitch, Instagram Live, wherever people are, and monetize off the back of that. We want to build more shows, more characters. But we want to own it—that’s what gives us the optionality to do a bowl game, host a red carpet event, or launch Hogwater and do something at a brewery. We’re a tiny company—less than 40 people—but owning everything means we can do whatever we want.

Speaking of owning things: The Onion, with the backing of Sandy Hook families owed about $1.5 billion in Alex Jones’s defamation judgment, won a 2024 bankruptcy auction for the company for a reported low-seven figures. The sale was then voided by a federal judge over auction irregularities, where the deal spent about 18 months in legal limbo. The acquisition fully closed this year after a lot of headaches. Why did you guys want it, and now that you have it, what are your plans?

It’s twofold. First, we were the only people standing in the way of Alex Jones getting InfoWars back for basically free, and I didn’t want that to happen as a human being. We’ve been through a lot of bullshit in the past 10 years, and I didn’t want this to be icing on the cake for these motherfuckers. I didn’t want him to get away with this, and we were in a position where we could stop it. I had a long conversation with my friends and family—I was like, we’re just going to keep going, we’re going to make it so no one else is going to stop it, we’re going to make it so he had to pay something for this. That was the most important thing to me—I thought a baseline of justice was still important.

But two, it made so much sense for us. We have to adapt as a company to the way people talk about stuff now, and the way they consume information. As you can hopefully see with the show this week (about trad wives), it would be weird if The Onion started talking about that directly, but we have to talk about it, and we need a vehicle to do that. What better vehicle than the place that essentially won the game until they really lost it? If you can take over the progenitor of the form and do it in a way that helps society, you might as well try it. So we did it.

That reminds me of our dinner with Neal Mohan, where you basically were like, “This platform is killing people.” Back then, you spent so much time wading through digital sewage. How did your past reporting play into the decision to go after InfoWars?

I think it was the first step in my brain of realizing I had a different job—as C.E.O. of a company, and as a guy living in this country at a time when things were crumbling around me—that I could be more than an observer. I could be an active participant in trying to fix things. That was a big change for me in pressing the button on this. It was like, okay, we’re not just sitting back and watching the decline—maybe we can gum up the works a little and make it harder for them to do the most evil stuff.

You hired the comedian Tim Heidecker to serve as creative director of the new InfoWars. How do you approach satirizing topics through the lens of that kind of brand?

You need a baseline understanding of what’s going on on the internet, how forced everything is, how almost religious everything’s become—and cable news is too obsessed with the minutiae of the day to step back and ask, “Wait, what happened to our society?” That’s what The Onion gets to do. Tim gets to go from zero to 60 and build characters—like Edi Patterson playing his ex-wife last week—diving into what’s wrong with these guys specifically, while the wider Onion lens looks at how financialized and religious everything’s become. HBO won’t touch this because they’re afraid of the government; CNN/MSNBC don’t have the ability to tell their audience what it all means. We’re in a weird lane where we can react in real time and fill that gap.

Is the InfoWars brand monetizable at this point? Can it be?

InfoWars has thrown the door open for our business generally. It used to be that advertisers didn’t want to be attached to The Onion because of the language, but InfoWars has moved the Overton window in our ad business. We also run a copy agency that’s enormously profitable—we just did copy for the Jackass movie, plus tons of TV shows that don’t want to be named publicly.

When we took over The Onion, it was almost a six-figure business, running out of steam on algorithmically generated boner-pill ads. We turned all that off and turned it into a newspaper company. Our goal is that the paper itself sustains the business no matter what happens with the rest of it—and that’s worked. This month, we’re printing and shipping more than 100,000 newspapers to subscribers, Barnes & Noble, and Hudson News throughout the country and the world for the first time in 12 years. The paper’s revenue alone is now 7x what it was when we took over.

To me, you will always be the guy who understood the internet the best because you saw its worst parts, and still held out hope for something better. How do you think the internet has evolved, and how do you think about covering it through The Onion now versus when you left NBC?

It’s reverting, at least for young people, to something closer to what was exciting about the internet 10 to 15 years ago—a means to an end to meet people in real life. That’s how I moved to New York, met my friends, discovered music and movies I never would have found. It destabilized culture in a way that let me exist functionally for the first time. Then people got the wrong idea—that being on the computer all day was the point. It never was. The internet helped me understand a world that had seemed vacuous and weird.

Now we’re back in a place where the people who consolidated the internet seem to think the goal is to keep us on the computer feeding the machine. I don’t think that’s what people want. For us it’s the opposite: How do we get you back into real life using the information? The Onion, at the end of the day, is a really good sentence generator for the real world—the distillation you can say in the elevator. We want people out in the world talking to each other again—which is part of why we have almost 83,000 people getting a physical newspaper in their mailbox again this month. We view the internet as a means to an end to get people into The Onion in real life. Dominating ChatGPT is not the goal.

Thanks, Julia. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Monday.

Dylan