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# Several hundred racks contain the Onion in SM
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/several-hundred-racks-contain-the-onion-in-sm/
- Published: 2007-01-17T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T23:51:24.000Z
- Author: Melody Hanatani
- Tags: Government & Politics, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Monicans in recent months as print copies of The Onion popped up in newsstands, bars and pizza parlors across the city.

The Onion newspaper is the brainchild of two former University of Wisconsin students, who began distributing free copies of their weekly rails against standard news publications in the Los Angeles area in August.

“It’s been on the charts \[to come to LA\] for a long time,” said Rob Bedell, LA city manager for the Onion.“We wanted to get our business model set before coming into Los Angeles.”

Laid out like a normal newspaper, the Onion dishes satirical articles on local and national news, sports, politics, business, education, science and technology. The only section that offers true, yet humorous, commentary is the AV Club — the paper’s entertainment section.

Several hundred news racks containing the Onion are scattered throughout the city, including Wildflour Pizza on Main Street, Brittania Pub on Santa Monica Boulevard and Over Under Sports Grill on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The paper has a circulation of 50,000 in the LA area, 20,000 of which comes from Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, Brentwood and Venice. The paper seems to be most popular in the North of Wilshire region, where almost no papers remain when new issues are delivered in the middle of the week.

“I work at three bars in Santa Monica and there’s never any copies left by the time they deliver the new editions,” said Tona Mondragon, a bartender at Over Under Sports Grill, 14 Below and The Shack.

Mondragon reads a copy whenever she can, appreciating the funny content that keeps her customers occupied whenever they venture into a bar alone. Some stop in just to grab a copy.

Bedell believes the paper is most appreciated among the college-educated to postgraduate crowds.

“They’re the overeducated, overpaid people who like to go out and have fun,” he said. “They get it, they’re in tune with business and the cultural events going on.”

The paper keeps Cara Wanek occupied whenever she’s in a restaurant and dining by herself.

“I love how people come up with stuff off the top of their head,” she said while sitting on the Third Street Promenade on Tuesday.

During the 1987-88 school year, Chris Johnson and Tim Keck, two students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, were sitting in their dorm room and making up funny stories. They soon put those stories into print and started selling ads.

“It ran rampant in the university and soon spilled over into the community,” Bedell said.

The Onion was soon distributed in Milwaukee, and then Chicago, gradually growing until 1996, when its popularity exploded during the dot-com boom. The humorous news that had brought tears of laughter to the eyes of so many people in the Midwest was now available online.

“The online component really took off because people could e-mail stories to each other,” Bedell said. “A lot of people have the confusion that it started online, but the roots are in print.”

Onion books began publishing in the late 1990s when print distribution began expanding to other markets. Today, the paper is offered for free in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Austin, Denver, Madison, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and, of course, Santa Monica.

How the founders came up with “The Onion” moniker remains a mystery to this day.

“I fear that it is lost in the annals of time,” Bedell said.“I have heard many rumors — it has layers that you have to peel back or reading it makes your eyes tear with laughter.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 17, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/011707.pdf?ref=smdp.com)