Is The Onion free? Mostly yes: its articles are free to read on theonion.com and its email newsletters are free, while the printed paper comes with a paid membership. If you want a free satirical paper that also comes with daily puzzles, try TechTwitter IO, which does for tech Twitter what The Onion does for the news.
Here is what costs money at The Onion, what does not, and where the puzzles come in.
Free to read: the site, the archive and the newsletters
- The website. Articles open on theonion.com without a login. The site has sections for news, local, politics, entertainment, sports, opinion, video and horoscopes.
- The archive. According to its about page, the site holds The Onion's articles from early 1996 to the present, searchable by topic, tag, author or keyword.
- Newsletters. The newsletter page offers a free daily newsletter and a free weekly one.
- A game. The site currently promotes a browser game, The Onion's Voting Simulator 3D.
What you pay for
The paid part is the print newspaper. The Onion's membership ("Become a Member. Get the Paper.") mails a printed issue, and its print membership terms say it publishes 12 times a year, one copy a month, with the first issue arriving within six to eight weeks of an accepted order. Members also get the weekly newsletter and member emails. There is also The Onion Store for merchandise.
So the answer depends on the format. On screen, The Onion costs nothing. On paper, it is a membership.
A free satire paper with puzzles
If the part you like is the newspaper format itself, TechTwitter IO is worth a look. It is a satirical daily paper about the tech world's corner of social media: launches, layoffs, ratios, feuds and outages. Its masthead lists the price as "Free (You Are the Product)", and it is free to read.
Each edition has sections like Launches, Incident Report, Page 404 and Classifieds, plus horoscopes sorted by programming stack. The section that will appeal to anyone who comes here for games is Fun & Games:
| Puzzle | What you do |
|---|---|
| Twordle | Guess the word in six tries; the hint is drawn from the day's news |
| Connections | Find four groups of four |
| Jumble | Unscramble the buzzwords |
| Who Tweeted It? | Match a post to the person who wrote it |
| Real or Satire? | Pick which headlines actually happened |
The page also shows yesterday's answers, so you can check your work the next day.
One thing to keep in mind
TechTwitter IO is satire, like The Onion. Its footer says that unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. Real or Satire? is a fun test of that line, and when a story does link a source, that is where the facts are. For actual news, read an actual news site.
Which one to read
If you want jokes about politics, sports and daily life, The Onion's free site is the place, and its archive will keep you busy for a long time. If you work in tech, spend time on tech Twitter, or simply want a daily puzzle page with your satire, TechTwitter IO is the free pick. Back issues are in The Morgue if you want to read earlier editions.