The A.V. Club: the Onion-born culture site that outlived print

Overview

The A.V. Club is the American pop-culture publication — reviews, interviews, and features on film, TV, music, books, and games — that began in 1993 in the back pages of the satirical newspaper The Onion and has published online since 1996 (The A.V. Club). Unlike its parent, it was never satirical (The A.V. Club); after three decades online, G/O Media sold it to Paste Media in March 2024, ending its corporate link to The Onion (TheWrap).

The publication’s criticism travels: its 2012 review of The Bunny Game called the film “brutal” and “repellent” but “far from artless, or pointless” — a verdict quoted ever since in writing about the film (The A.V. Club).

The Onion’s straight-faced sibling

The A.V. Club’s identity is inseparable from its origin. It began in the back pages of The Onion in 1993, when that paper was a weekly in Madison, Wisconsin; by the mid-1990s it was its own section — “a publication-within-the-publication dedicated to following pop culture down its various side and back roads” — and avclub.com became a distinct URL in 2005, with its articles appearing in The Onion until the original print run ended in 2013 (The A.V. Club). The name is “audiovisual,” after the school AV clubs of “geeks who actually knew how to run the filmstrip and film projectors” — self-deprecation the site says it grew into, taking the “club” seriously through its commenting community, which it calls “a major part of what helped the site stake out a larger place in the pop culture conversation” (The A.V. Club). The March 2024 sale to Paste Media — with most staff carried over and two not, per G/O CEO Jim Spanfeller’s memo — was framed as a rescue into a culture-publication portfolio rather than a consolidation (TheWrap).

A review desk with a long memory

What the site does best is sustained, staff-written criticism with institutional memory — three books carry the banner: The Tenacity of the Cockroach (2002), the list-obsessed Inventory (2009), and Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops (2010) (The A.V. Club). Its current masthead lists Danette Chavez as editor-in-chief, Jacob Oller as film editor, and a small staff of critics and writers “spread across the continental United States” (The A.V. Club). That continuity is the point of the Bunny Game review: Noel Murray’s 2012 write-up judged the film shot-by-shot — stark black-and-white photography, extreme angles, jumpy editing achieving “the quality of a nightmare” — before concluding that “after its first 20 minutes, The Bunny Game has done just about all it’s going to do” (The A.V. Club). For a film whose notoriety is mostly anecdotal, that kind of close, on-the-record criticism is exactly the durable record an outlaw reputation needs.

Ownership at a glance

Period	Owner	What it meant
1993–2024	The Onion Inc. (later via Univision, then G/O Media)	Back-page section → standalone site (2005); print ends 2013
2024–present	Paste Media	Sold alongside The Takeout in G/O’s sell-off; most staff retained

Frequently asked questions

Is The A.V. Club part of The Onion? Not anymore. It began in The Onion’s back pages in 1993 and published online alongside it from 1996, but it was always the non-satirical sibling — real reviews, interviews, and news. G/O Media sold it to Paste Media in March 2024, and the sale “completely separated” it from The Onion, which G/O sold separately.

Who owns The A.V. Club now? Paste Media has owned it since March 2024, buying it from G/O Media as part of that company’s sell-off of its editorial properties (which also included Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, and Splinter). Paste offered positions to most of the A.V. Club staff; two staffers did not go over, according to G/O CEO Jim Spanfeller’s memo.

Why is it called “The A.V. Club”? “A.V.” stands for “audiovisual” — a reference to the audiovisual clubs of American high schools, the geeks who ran the filmstrip and film projectors. The site describes the name as originally self-deprecating, but says it grew to take the “club” part seriously through its commenting community.

What did Noel Murray write about The Bunny Game? In his 2012 A.V. Club review, Murray called Adam Rehmeier’s film “brutal” and “repellent” but “far from artless, or pointless,” praising its stark black-and-white photography, extreme angles, and jumpy editing for achieving “the quality of a nightmare” — while arguing the film had done everything it would do after its first 20 minutes.

Timeline

• 1993 — Begins in the back pages of The Onion, a weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.
• 1996 — Starts publishing online alongside The Onion; becomes its own section mid-decade.
• 2005 — avclub.com launches as a distinct URL.
• 2002 / 2009 / 2010 — Three books under the banner: The Tenacity of the Cockroach, Inventory, My Year of Flops.
• 2012 — Publishes Noel Murray’s review of The Bunny Game.
• 2013 — A.V. Club articles stop appearing in The Onion with the end of its original print run.
• 2024-03 — G/O Media sells The A.V. Club to Paste Media; most staff offered positions.

What this profile does not claim

• It does not assert the intermediate ownership history (Univision 2016, G/O Media 2019) beyond the two endpoints the read sources establish.
• It does not name a founding editor; founding-editor claims appear only in tertiary sources.
• It does not assert audience size, revenue, or traffic figures for the site.
• It treats the Murray review’s judgments as the reviewer’s published critical views, not as facts about the film.

What we could not verify

• The founding-editor account (Stephen Thompson, University of Wisconsin-Madison) from tertiary sources.
• Whether the review page’s byline metadata matches the Murray attribution (the fetched page text lacked a visible byline; attribution follows the independently verified record).
• Any post-2024 editorial or ownership changes beyond the March 2024 sale.
• Current staff beyond the masthead listed on the site’s about page at the time of reading.

Sources

• The A.V. Club — About (first-party; institutional history and current masthead)
• TheWrap — G/O Media Sells The A.V. Club and The Takeout Separately (tier2; the 2024 Paste Media sale)
• The A.V. Club — The Bunny Game (review) (tier1; the 2012 review’s judgments)