The A.V. Club
American online newspaper and entertainment website
The A.V. Club is an online newspaper and entertainment website featuring reviews, interviews, and other articles that examine films, music, television, books, games, and other elements of pop-culture media. The A.V. Club was created in 1993 as a supplement to its satirical parent publication, The Onion. Since March 2024, it is owned by Paste Media and unassociated with The Onion.
While it was a part of The Onion's 1996 website launch, The A.V. Club had minimal presence on the website at that point. A 2005 website redesign placed The A.V. Club in a more prominent position, allowing its online identity to grow. Unlike The Onion, The A.V. Club is not satirical. The publication's name is a reference to audiovisual (AV) clubs typical of American high schools.
History
In 1993, five years after the founding of The Onion, Stephen Thompson, a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, launched an entertainment section of the newspaper. Its name refers to audio visual clubs offered by American high schools during the late 20th century for students to use and learn about equipment like speakers and projectors.
Alongside The Onion's move from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City in early 2001, the A.V. Club staff also left Madison to move into The Onion's satellite office in Chicago.
The public source identifies “The A.V. Club” as american online newspaper and entertainment website. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Club, American and online.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3233970. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2024, 1996 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “The A.V. Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.