The Onion | The Adobo Chronicles

Chicago, Illinois – America’s Finest News Source is proposing a merger with Your Source of Up-to-date Unbelievable News.

The Chicago-based The Onion has offered to absorb the international operations of the Silicon Valley-based The Adobo Chronicles for $2 Million. The Onion, which started its Internet operations in 1988, boasts of a monthly viewership of 11 Million. The Adobo Chronicles, on the other hand, started just nine months ago and is now enjoying an average monthly viewership of 1 Million.

Investors for The Onion see a great potential to increase its worldwide viewership by merging with The Adobo Chronicles.

The Adobo Chronicles has assembled a team of lawyers and investment analysts to study the merger proposal. The name of the merged company is obviously a sticky issue, with both media outlets wanting to retain their respective names. Ironically, the names of both companies have to do with food: onion being a widely-used vegetable for cooking and adobo being the national dish of the Philippines.

Negotiators on either side have, however, agreed on the tagline for the merged company: “Your Finest Source of Up-to-Date Unbelievable World News.” A great start in the negotiations.

Media mergers and buyouts are becoming more and more common but this proposed merger is different in that it has nothing to do with either company’s financial challenges. Rather it is seen as great potential for expansion and viewership.

Atlanta, Georgia – The bleeding in the country’s newsrooms never seems to stop. All around the country, newsrooms are laying off personnel. Newspapers are paring down their circulation. Television news networks are moving more and more towards entertainment content. Above all, mergers between and among media companies are becoming a weekly occurrence.

The latest announced merger is between Cable News Network (CNN), the pioneer in 24-hour broadcast news, and The Onion, the pioneer in organized news satire. Many in the journalism profession saw it coming, especially after CNN.com’s managing editor Meredith Artley appeared as a guest columnist in the latest issue of The Onion. Artley’s column delved on why CNN.com made Miley Cyrus’ almost pornographic performance at the last Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards its top story on Monday.

CNN CEO Jeff Zucker, in making the announcement at the network’s headquarters in Atlanta, said that the merger of the two media outlets cannot be more perfect. “It’s a partnership made in heaven,” Zucker said. “Time and again, consumers of news have seen the parallelism between the CNN and The Onion styles of reporting. Both outlets excel in entertainment, sensationalism, and fakery,” he added.

The Adobo Chronicles interviewed people on the street to get their reaction to the merger. One avid news consumer was ecstatic, saying that “finally, I do not have to decide which news is true and which is fake. Now I know to consider this one (merged) news source as totally fake.”