The Onion editorial staff to move from New York to Chicago

Huffington Post | Crain’s Chicago Business
The Onion moved staffers from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City in 2001, so it could expand its product line — “sheets, towels and a signature line of anodized aluminum cookware” — and be part of a larger comedy scene. “(New York, according to reports, has a larger comedy-writing community than you might find amid Madison’s head shops and Tibetan restaurants,” the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Johnson wrote a decade ago.) Now editorial staffers have been told they’ll relocate to Chicago before next summer. “Everybody is a little bit blindsided, and there are those who are determined to stay in New York,” says features editor Joe Garden. “I can tell you that the [New York] mayor’s office has been informed.” An Onion spokesperson says: “We’re still in the very early stages of this process, but we’re looking forward to eventually having everyone under one roof in Chicago,” where CEO Steve Hannah and other corporate staffers relocated in 2007. || NYT in 2006: “The absence of solid Midwestern comfort food [in New York] has posed a challenge for the paper’s art department, which requires a certain girthiness of many of the people who pose for the fake news photos.”