The Onion’s New Layout Feels Like a Deep Betrayal ⇥ theonion.com

Me, back in August, after the A.V. Club migrated their website to the ex-Gawker Kinja platform:

All of this is to say that I hope Clickhole and the Onion don’t look like Deadspin when they launch on Kinja. They’re very different websites, and their design should articulate that. I think the Onion would be markedly less funny if it didn’t look like a hard news website, and giving it the generic Kinja treatment would be a bleak milestone for one of the most consistently brilliant places on the web.

The Onion has now been publishing on Kinja for about a week and, frankly, I think I was right. It doesn’t feel like a satirical take on hard news any more; it’s more of a parody of the Gizmodo Media Group family of websites. The writing is still hilarious, but plopping that writing into Kinja’s generic layout robs it of its potency.