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The Onion‘s Twitter Feed Hijacked by Pro-Syria Hackers (The Wrap / Media Alley)
The Onion, America’s finest fake news organization, was the latest victim of cyber hacking on Monday when the Syrian Electronic Army took over its Twitter account to tweet a slew of anti-Israel messages. NYT / Bits A member of the Syrian Electronic Army who goes by the hacker handle “Th3 Pr0″ told The New York Times that the group aimed at The Onion because of a recent Onion parody post, purportedly written by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, titled: “Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People.” “The Onion is a satire news organization and quite often is more trusted to reflect the news than the corporate media is known to,” Th3 Pr0 wrote in an email. The Onion Following Monday’s incident in which the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the Onion‘s Twitter account, sources at America’s Finest News Source confirmed that its Twitter password has been changed to OnionMan77 in order to prevent any future cyber-attacks. “We have taken the necessary measures to ensure this kind of thing never happens again,” said Onion IT specialist Nick Abersold. Read more

The Onion, as we noted back in September, is moving its operations out of our great city and centralizing everything in Chicago. When staffers heard about the move from CEO Steve Hannah, many were angered by the situation. Now that the move is beginning, the numbers are showing that many were very upset: The Atlantic Wire is reporting that only five of the 16 staffers have agreed to move and thus keep their jobs.

Hannah thinks he did everything possible to make the move enticing:

While Hannah acknowledged ‘I could have been far more delicate about delivering the news,’ he said he’s tried to do right by the editorial team. ‘I regret the way that first meeting went but I certainly don’t apologize for making extremely generous offers for everyone. Every single New York writer was offered a raise and a relocation package.’

Look, we know it’s not easy to move from New York to Chicago. This is New York, and well, everywhere else is everywhere else. And leaving behind friends and real pizza for strangers and slop that vaguely resembles pizza is difficult. But writers turning down jobs, raises and relocation packages seems crazy. Hope it all works out for them.

For your FishbowlNY editors, the Magic 8-Ball toy was quite the hit when we were kids. We asked it stupid questions like, “Does my oldest brother poop his pants?” then we’d shake the toy and shout with satisfaction when the plastic die revealed, “Signs point to yes,” that our teenage sibling had difficulty controlling his bowels.

The Onion, by launching its new “Magic Answer Ball” iPhone app, has harnessed that simple fun that we once so enjoyed and put it on our phones. Available for .99 cents, the app works exactly like the Magic 8-Ball. You simply ask it a question, shake your phone, and the app spits out an answer.

If you’re not in the mood to come up with your own question, there are even some “Questions of The Day” available to you.

“Placing the power of the Magic Answer Ball into people’s hands is not something the Onion editors take lightly,” said Chris Karwowski, a writer at The Onion, and one of the people behind the app. “Knowing the answers to some questions can bring peace of mind but it can also extract a terrible toll upon your psyche. But keep in mind The Onion Magic Answer Ball is very reasonably priced.”

The Onion is leaving Gotham. According to The Huffington Post, the editorial operations of the paper, which have been here for the past decade, are being moved to Chicago by next summer. The Onion’s headquarters are located in the windy city, but the announcement came as a shock to New York staffers.

“There’s no indication of what’s going to happen next,” Features Editor Joe Garden said. “I don’t think the writers have come to a consensus. Everybody is a little bit blindsided, and there are those who are determined to stay in New York.” A spokesperson for The Onion didn’t give a reason for the move, only adding, “We’re looking forward to eventually having everyone under one roof in Chicago.”

This is sad news. New York loves the Onion and it’s too bad that their writers are now having to decide between moving with the paper or staying and probably losing their jobs.

We were going to use the headline, “Paper Desires Lower Worker Morale, Moves Operations to Lesser City,” but we thought that would be too cruel.

The Onion, the world’s best source for sarcastic headlines, is launching a campaign to get itself a Pulitzer Prize. According to The New York Times, the push comes alongside the paper’s 1,000th issue, and includes support from Gayle King, because why wouldn’t it include support from her?

The paper is also asking readers to chip in:

The Onion is also asking ‘concerned citizens’ to sign a form letter and ‘mail it to the pieces of garbage’ at the actual Pulitzer board office at Columbia. The letter’s salutation doesn’t lack for subtlety. ‘You Ignorant, Negligent Swine,’ it begins.

FishbowlNY officially pledges its fake support for this fake effort.

With headlines such as “UFC Fighter Has Idea for T-Shirt With A Bunch Of Shit Written All Over It,” The Onion never fails to provide us all with hilarious sports stories. And now, thankfully, it’s putting those headlines together in one place.

In October The Onion is publishing The Ecstasy Of Defeat, a collection of its best sports headlines. Good news, right? Well here’s some better news: Our very own SportsNewser got a sneak peek at the cover.

Go check it out, we promise it’s worth it.

This is amazing. The New York Times wrote an article documenting just how squeaky clean Tiger Beat magazine has been from its outset, a “see-no-evil, speak-no-evil place holder for young readers not yet ready for the complex questions posed by, say, Seventeen magazine.” With it they included a bunch of classic Tiger Beat covers, featuring Leo! And Justin! And Zac! And… Barack?

Unfortunately for the Times, it also included a spoof Tiger Beat cover designed by The Onion, featuring dreamboat Barack Obama declaring he “sings in the shower!”

Yesterday the Times issued this correction:

A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with an article about how the original teen-girl tabloid has remained virtually unchanged since its inception in 1965, erroneously included a parody cover, produced by the satiric newspaper The Onion, that featured a picture of President Obama.

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One of FishbowlNY’s favorites – The Onion – has launched its first iPad app. Available for free, the app includes content from the website, as well as video from its shows.

As Baratunde Thurston, Director of Digital for The Onion, notes, everything else in your world is now obsolete.

“Whatever other news applications you’ve installed up to this point can be deleted now. Also, please try to avoid touching our news in inappropriate places. There are good touches and bad touches.”

If you’ve got an iPad, this is definitely worth downloading. All we ask is that you keep your touching habits to yourself.

“The Onion Hires General Manager; Hopes to Have Him Generally Manage.” How’s that? Oh c’mon it’s not that bad. Anyway, fake headline aside, the real news is that  Mitch Semel has been hired by The Onion as their new General Manager. He’ll oversee all of its editorial content, including the newspaper and TV shows.

By all indications the hiring of Semel, who most recently was executive producer of The Oprah Winfrey Network’s live morning talk show, is a sign that The Onion will keep expanding its TV programming. Semel has an extensive background in TV, having managed programming for Comedy Central, CNN, CBS, and NBC.

It took this long for Si Newhouse to come up with an iPhone application for one of his Condé Nast titles? (edit: Condé has 10 other apps out for various other magazines, but this will be the first for Vanity Fair.) Well, no one is going to accuse the media titan of knowing too much about the Internet, but at least he can make Vanity Fair on par with, say, The Onion in terms of techno-savviness. As of today, you can officially get the Vanity Fair Hollywood App for free, which allows you to pick who you think will win the Academy Awards, and share that information with your friends. Sounds like a half-baked project in social media? Probably, but it’s a good start. The project teams up with L’oreal Paris cosmetics to provide specials via the “gift-bag feature” of the app.

Full press release after the jump.

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