The A.V Club
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| Type | Popular culture, entertainment, news, reviews, politics, progressive |
|---|---|
| Format | Internet |
| Owner(s) | The Onion, Inc. |
| Editor-in-chief | Laura M. Browning, Sean O’Neal |
| Founded | 1993 |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Sister newspapers | The Onion |
| Website | avclub |
The A.V. Club is an entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other regular offerings that examine media such as films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop culture. The A.V. Club was created in 1993 as a supplement to The Onion, although it had a minimal presence on The Onion's website in its early years. A 2005 website redesign placed The A.V. Club in a more prominent position, allowing its online identity to grow. 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 film strip and film projectors".
In 1993, five years after the founding of The Onion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UWM student Stephen Thompson launched an entertainment section, later renamed The A.V. Club, as part of the newspaper's 1995 re-made.
Both The Onion and The A.V. Club made their internet debut in 1996.The A.V. Club acquired its own internet domain name in December 1999.
In December 2004, Stephen Thompson left his position as founding editor of The A.V. Club. The website was redesigned in 2005 to incorporate blogs and reader comments. In 2006, concurrent with another redesign, the website shifted its model again to begin adding content on a daily, rather than weekly, basis.
According to Sean Mills, then-president of The Onion, the A.V. Club website received more than 1 million unique visitors for the first time in October 2007. In late 2009, the website was reported to have received over 1.4 million unique visitors and 75,000 comments per month.
On December 9, 2010, the now-defunct website ComicsComicsMag revealed 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—and published on "The A.V. Club". The offending review was removed, and then-editor Keith Phipps posted an apology on the website. Leonard Pierce, the author of the review, was terminated from his freelance role with the website.
At its peak, the print version of The A.V. Club was available in 17 different cities. Localized sections of the website were also maintained, with reviews and news relevant to specific cities. The print version and localized websites were gradually discontinued, and in December 2013, print publication ceased in the final three markets.
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