The A.V. Club
Encyclopedia
The A.V. Club is an entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment consists of any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie. Active forms of amusement, such as sports, are more often considered to be recreation...

 newspaper
Newspaper
A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 and website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 published by The Onion
The Onion
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is an entertainment newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club...

. Its features include reviews of new films, music, television, books, games and DVDs, as well as interviews
Interviews
Interviews is:# the plural form of "interview"# a compilation album by Bob Marley & the Wailers, see Interviews # a C++ toolkit for the X Window System, see InterViews...

 and other regular offerings examining both new and classic media and other elements of pop culture. Unlike its parent publication, The A.V. Club is not satirical
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

, though much of its content maintains a similarly humorous tone.

The A.V. Club print edition is bundled with The Onion and distributed as a free publication in Philadelphia, Madison
Madison, Wisconsin
Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. It is also home to the University of Wisconsin–Madison....

, Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee is the largest city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, the 28th most populous city in the United States and 39th most populous region in the United States. It is the county seat of Milwaukee County and is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. According to 2010 census data, the...

, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver
Denver, Colorado
The City and County of Denver is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Denver is a consolidated city-county, located in the South Platte River Valley on the western edge of the High Plains just east of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains...

/Boulder
Boulder, Colorado
Boulder is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County and the 11th most populous city in the U.S. state of Colorado. Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of...

, Austin
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

, Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

, Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...

, and Toronto, Canada
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

.

The A.V. Club is based in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

.

History

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. (The name references "The Audio-Visual Club", a common stereotype of a geek
Geek
The word geek is a slang term, with different meanings ranging from "a computer expert or enthusiast" to "a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts", with a general pejorative meaning of "a peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, esp[ecially] one who is perceived to...

y high school organization.) 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 .

According to Onion president Sean Mills, the A.V. Club website received over one 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.

Thompson left his position as editor of The A.V. Club in December 2004. He was replaced by Keith Phipps.

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.

Regular features

  • Newswire, blog-style reporting of pop culture news items
  • Commentary Tracks of the Damned, a feature reviewing DVD audio commentaries of universally panned films
  • Films That Time Forgot, an examination of B movie
    B movie
    A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

    s
  • Random Rules, an interview asking a celebrity to account for random tracks on his or her personal MP3 player
  • Random Roles, an interview focusing on several selected roles from an actor's career
  • Inventory, a list of examples from a pop culture-related theme, such as "15 True Comeback Albums" or "24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice"
  • The Hater, a column by Amelie Gillette
    Amelie Gillette
    Amelie Gillette is a newspaper columnist and television writer. She is currently the author of the weekly infographic The Tolerability Index for The Onion’s A.V. Club and is a writer for The Office. She has written for many publications, including Spin, The Believer, and Blender.- Early life...

     focusing on pop culture and celebrity news, and its offshoot The Tolerability Index. The Hater was put on hiatus in May 2010 as Gillette left The A.V. Club to become a writer for the TV series The Office, but The Tolerability Index is still published weekly.
  • My Year of Flops, reviews of box-office bombs by Nathan Rabin
    Nathan Rabin
    Nathan Rabin is an American film and music critic. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rabin was the first head writer for The A.V. Club, a position he continues to hold today....

  • Taste Test, reports and reviews of unusual foodstuffs
  • T.V. Club, episode-by-episode reviews of a wide variety of both current and classic TV shows
  • The A.V. Club Blog, a more casual forum for the site's writers to share anecdotes and observations
  • A.V. Club Crossword
    Crossword
    A crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer...

    , edited by Ben Tausig
  • Savage Love
    Savage Love
    Savage Love is a syndicated sex-advice column by Dan Savage. The column appears weekly in several dozen newspapers, mainly free newspapers in the US and Canada, but also newspapers in Europe and Asia...

    , a syndicated sex advice column by Dan Savage
    Dan Savage
    Daniel Keenan "Dan" Savage is an American author, media pundit, journalist and newspaper editor. Savage writes the internationally syndicated relationship and sex advice column Savage Love. Its tone is frank in its discussion of sexuality, often humorous, and hostile to social conservatives, as in...

  • Red Meat, a syndicated comic strip by Max Cannon
    Max Cannon
    Max Cannon is author and creator of the independent comic strip Red Meat.Cannon began producing the strip in 1989 for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student newspaper of the University of Arizona . The strip was later picked up by the Tucson Weekly, and it now appears in over 75 alternative weeklies...

  • Then That's What They Called Music, a series by Nathan Rabin chronicling pop music's evolution through the CD series Now That's What I Call Music!
    Now That's What I Call Music!
    Now That's What I Call Music! is a series of various artists compilation albums released in the United Kingdom and Ireland by Polygram /EMI/Sony Music/Virgin Records ; spinoff series were later introduced in South Africa and many other countries worldwide, including the United States...

  • Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?, Steven Hyden's personal retrospective on alternative music in the 1990s
    1990s
    File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...

    .
  • The New Cult Canon, a series by Scott Tobias examining movies from the '90s and the '00s that have attained cult status.
  • Scenic Routes, Mike D'Angelo looks at key movie scenes, explaining their meaning and importance.
  • A.V. Undercover, a video series featuring bands covering songs in the A.V. Club office.
  • My Favorite Music Year, a series where various writers try to answer the question: What year in music means the most to you?
  • Pop Pilgrims, Dan Telfer and Brian Berrebbi's video series of their travels to famous film, TV, and literary locations.
  • Comics Panel, bi-weekly reviews of comic books.
  • Sawbuck Gamer, a column highlighting inexpensive games.


The eight print editions of The A.V. Club include subsections containing local content such as event previews and dining guides. They also include additional comics such as Postage Stamp Comics by Shannon Wheeler
Shannon Wheeler
Shannon Wheeler is an American cartoonist best known for creating the satirical superhero Too Much Coffee Man, and as a cartoonist for The New Yorker.-Career:...

 and Wondermark
Wondermark
Wondermark is a webcomic created by David Malki which was syndicated to Flak Magazine and appeared in The Onion's print edition through 2008. It features 19th-century illustrations that have been recontextualized to create humorous juxtapositions. It takes the horizontal four-panel shape of a...

by David Malki. Not all print editions include Savage Love and Red Meat, generally due to other syndication arrangements in those cities.

Books

In 2002, The A.V. Club released a collection of 68 interviews that had been featured in previous issues, entitled The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders (2002, ISBN 1-4000-4724-2).

On October 13, 2009, the second A.V. Club book, Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists (2009, ISBN 1-4165-9473-6) was released, featuring a combination of never-before-published lists and material already available on the AV Club website.

The A.V. Club released My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure (2010, ISBN 1-4391-5312-4) on October 19, 2010. The book consists of entries taken from the site's recurring My Year of Flops column along with new material not previously available. It is A.V. Clubs first release credited to a single author, Nathan Rabin
Nathan Rabin
Nathan Rabin is an American film and music critic. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rabin was the first head writer for The A.V. Club, a position he continues to hold today....

.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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