WHEN Sean Mills left Boston College with a degree in philosophy and political science, he took a job at a Wall Street investment bank. But it didn’t take him long to figure out it wasn’t where he belonged.
“I knew I wouldn’t last long when I noticed my boss had a little crocheted plaque hanging on his cubicle that read, ‘Don’t worry, Friday is on the way.’ ”
He left soon after – and today he works in an office where barbed humor plays a much bigger role than earnest homilies. Mills, a 32-year-old New Jersey native, is president of the satirical newspaper the Onion, a k a “America’s Finest News Source” (recent headline: “Nation’s Snowmen March Against Global Warming”).
Mills took a job at the paper – which was founded in Madison, Wis., in 1988, and is now headquartered in SoHo – after a spell running an advertising agency, when an acquaintance from his investor days became its majority owner and brought him on board. Today, as president, Mills masterminds new projects for the Onion, straddling the divide between the editorial and business sides. This means he’s required to exercise both his right-brain creative side and his left-brain business side – though he’s shy to admit it.
“You know what I am, I’m the ‘no brain,’ ” he says. “I just bring the best right brains together with the best left brains, and let them figure everything out.”
When did you start at the Onion?
I came on in 2002, and I don’t really know what my title was, but it was more in a business capacity – like ad sales, marketing and business development all rolled into one. But I was in New York, where most of the writers are, and most of the businesspeople were in the Midwest. So I built this relationship with the writers and pushed myself more towards content.
Are you like a publisher?
In a lot of senses, yes. Every publication has a business side and a creative side and I’m kind of in the middle.
How do you bridge the gap?
The nice thing is that everyone who works on the business side has such a ridiculous amount of respect for what we do creatively. So nobody wants to be the person that tries to sell it out in any way, or whore it out for some advertiser in the wrong context. There’s a shared respect that means that the animosity doesn’t exist the way it might at other places.
Is there such a thing as a typical day for you?
I don’t think there is. I work very closely with the editors and with our team of product developers, which is our designers, technology people, our business development – the people who are developing different products. Right now, for example, we’re working on a new brand that’s going to be local content. So I’m in a lot of meetings talking about what’s this product going to be. How are we going to design it, what’s it going to look like, how are we going to build it? And sometimes I have meetings with just the editors. I had a meeting this morning to decide what we’re going to call our 2008 election coverage. We decided on “War for the White House.” But next week we have a meeting with Pepsi to talk about a big advertising relationship.
In those meetings, are you the guy who makes the ultimate decision?
Well, it’s very collaborative. When we’re trying to make these decisions, it’s all about getting the right brains in the room. I’m fortunate to work with really smart, really creative people. So we all get in a room together, but in the end I’m the tie-breaker or I’m going to make the decision. Now, if it’s a purely editorial thing, we have an editor-in-chief, and he’s empowered to make those decisions.
But where’s there an intersection between business and creative, you make the call?
Yes, and there are a lot of those. That’s why I love my job. It’s very creative and I’m constantly doing new things and trying to innovate, yet there’s a growing business under it, too. So it satisfies the creative side and the pragmatic side of wanting to run a successful business and seeing it grow.
What are some things you’re working on?
For a long time we’ve wanted to produce live-action content. We wanted to figure out how to take what we do in the newspaper and have it work in video, and specifically Web video. The first question I always ask is, how would we do it creatively? Will it work with our brand? So my first meeting is to sit down with the editors and the writers and brainstorm a little bit.
Then I met with our CFO and our ad sales team and our business development team to figure out if this is a good business decision. What does the marketplace look like? Once we figured out that this was a risk worth taking, I’m in the center of hiring people to run this business. I worked with the teams to say, “OK, here’s our budget,” and with the writers to say, “We need these sort of scripts by this date.” Now it sort of runs itself.
Describe your work environment.
You would think it’s like, this really happy-go-lucky place. No, it’s a horrible, Darwinian, Machiavellian environment where people are passive-aggressive and everyone’s stabbing each other in the back. It really is bad. Which is why the perfect day for me is one where I get to fire people, lord over people. . . . All right, no. People are often surprised by the comedy environment, because it’s definitely more subdued than you expect. Sort of like a wine tasting. It’s pretty serious. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re the most important newspaper in the country.
Why should people want your job?
I don’t want anyone to want my job, because I’m easily threatened.