Scott Dikkers / Courtesy
Scott Dikkers, former owner and editor-in-chief of The Onion, will speak at 6:30 p.m. March 10 inside Hillside Auditorium on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville.
Dikkers will discuss the launch and rise of the popular news satire publication he helped start in the late 1980s.
The event is the latest in the Honors College Invites series, which invites thinkers and doers to share their craft with the campus and community.
A public reception is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in the Honors Student Lounge in Gearhart Hall. The talk is free and open to the public, but an RSVP (here) is required to attend the reception.
The Onion was launched in 1988 by Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson, two students at the University of Wisconsin. Shortly after, Dikkers (also a UW student) came onboard to draw cartoons and by the third issue was editing the publication.
“It [operated] out of somebody’s dorm room for the first couple of months, and then it was in somebody’s house; I don’t think we had an office until year two, and I don’t think we got paid until year three,” Dikkers said in an Eye to Eye CBS News interview in 2013.
Today TheOnion.com is one of the world’s most popular humor websites, with millions of readers and social media followers.
Dikkers is publication’s longest-serving editor-in-chief, and co-owned the paper from 1989 to 2003. In 2006 he created The Onion News Network, which has spawned numerous viral videos and three TV series. He’s the best-selling co-author of The Onion’s first two original books, Our Dumb Century and Our Dumb World. His work has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, a Peabody and over 30 Webby Awards. Dikkers developed and currently oversees The Onion training center at Chicago’s Second City.
