| Type | Alt-Weekly Entertainment Newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Paper (included with The Onion) and Internet |
| Owner | The Onion, Inc. |
| Editor | Keith Phipps |
| Founded | Mid-90s (see History) |
| Headquarters | Chicago |
| Official website | www.avclub.com |
The A.V. Club is an entertainment newspaper and website published by The Onion. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its parent publication, The A.V. Club is not satirical, though much of its content maintains a similarly humorous tone.
The A.V. Club print edition is bundled with The Onion and distributed as a free publication in Philadelphia, Madison, Milwaukee, New York City, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin, Washington, D.C., Ann Arbor, and Toronto, Canada.[1]
The A.V. Club is based in Chicago.[2]
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In 1993, five years after the founding of The Onion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW student Stephen Thompson launched an entertainment section, later renamed The A.V. Club as part of the newspaper's 1995 redesign. (The name references "The Audio-Visual Club", a common stereotype of a geeky high school organization.) While the section was initially viewed as an afterthought to the publication's flagship fake news stories, Thompson credited it as becoming "very important" in allowing The Onion to expand distribution nationwide, as it was easier to sell advertising next to movie reviews and concert listings than satirical news items.
Both The Onion and The A.V. Club made their Internet debut in 1996, although not all print features were immediately available online. The A.V. Club website was redesigned in 2005 to incorporate blogs and reader comments. In 2006, concurrent with another redesign, the site shifted its model to begin adding content on a daily rather than weekly basis .
According to Onion president Sean Mills, the A.V. Club website received over one million unique visitors for the first time in October 2007.[3] In late 2009, the site was reported as receiving over 1.4 million unique visitors and 75,000 comments per month.[2]
Thompson left his position as editor of The A.V. Club in December 2004. He was replaced by Keith Phipps.
On December 9, 2010, it was discovered that a capsule review for the book Genius, Isolated: The Life And Art Of Alex Toth had been fabricated; the book had not yet been published or even completed by the authors.[4] The offending review was removed from The A.V. Club, and editor Keith Phipps posted an apology on the site.[5]
The eight print editions of The A.V. Club include subsections containing local content such as event previews and dining guides. They also include additional comics such as Postage Stamp Comics by Shannon Wheeler and Wondermark by David Malki. Not all print editions include Savage Love and Red Meat, generally due to other syndication arrangements in those cities.
In 2002, The A.V. Club released a collection of 68 interviews that had been featured in previous issues, entitled The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders (2002, ISBN 1-4000-4724-2).
On October 13, 2009, the second A.V. Club book, Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists (2009, ISBN 1-4165-9473-6) was released, featuring a combination of never-before-published lists and material already available on the AV Club website.
The A.V. Club released My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure (2010, ISBN 1-4391-5312-4) on October 19, 2010. The book consists of entries taken from the site's recurring My Year of Flops column along with new material not previously available. It is A.V. Clubs first release credited to a single author, Nathan Rabin.
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