The A.V. Club
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| Type | Popular culture, entertainment, news, reviews, politics, progressive |
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| Format | Internet |
| Owner(s) | The Onion, Inc. |
| Editor-in-chief | John Teti |
| Founded | 1993 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Chicago |
| Sister newspapers | The Onion |
| Website | avclub |
The A.V. Club is an entertainment website featuring reviews of films, music, television, books and games, as well as interviews and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. The A.V. Club was initially created in 1993 as a supplemental part of The Onion and had a minimal presence on The Onion’s website in its early years, but in 2005—during a website redesign—its online identity grew and matured in ways that allowed it to have an identity all of its own. Unlike its parent publication, The A.V. Club is not satirical.
The publication’s name is a reference to school audiovisual clubs, "composed of a bunch of geeks who actually knew how to run the filmstrip and film projectors."
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. 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.
In December 2004, Stephen Thompson left his position as founding editor of The A.V. Club.
According to then Onion president Sean Mills, the A.V. Club website received more than 1 million unique visitors for the first time in October 2007. In late 2009, the site was reported as receiving over 1.4 million unique visitors and 75,000 comments per month.
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. The offending review was removed from The A.V. Club, and editor Keith Phipps posted an apology on the site. The author of the review was terminated from their freelance role with The A.V. Club.
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