Emerson's Onion connection a BJ alumnus
Nathan Heskia
|
The path of a college graduate is always unpredictable. For Joseph Randazzo, '02, getting a job as an associate editor for The Onion, one of the most popular satirical news outlets around today, came after a long period of relocating, working at coffee shops, and realizing he wanted nothing to do with being the producer of a reality TV show.
Today, Randazzo is involved in pretty much every aspect of The Onion's collaborative process, from brainstorming jokes to overseeing the graphics department to putting the final issue of each paper together. "The only setback is that I now absolutely hate comedy," Randazzo said. More recently, he was a writer and one of four editors for The Onion's new mock atlas Our Dumb World. "I think we managed to put together one of the most ambitious, comprehensive, and actually funny comedy books ever written."
And funny it is, with its description of places like France as "One Nation Above God" and Australia as "As Seen on Animal Planet." It's a 256-page book for the "elite consumer" with a sense of humor, but probably not for the politically correct. "It was a real challenge to find the right voice for the book, and to figure out how to make all those terrible and/or boring countries interesting, funny, and accessible," Randazzo said. Eventually, he was even taken off his weekly duties of putting each issue together to focus on meeting the book's deadline, which called for 20-hour days and 7-day workweeks
Randazzo grew up in New Hampshire and came to Emerson for broadcast journalism. While at Emerson, he interned at the Fox News Channel and worked semi-freelance as a news writer for the local NPR station, WBUR, where he continued to work after graduation. Randazzo ended up moving to New York City on saved scholarship money in hopes of breaking into WNYC, New York's public radio, but "it didn't happen that way. It was exceedingly difficult to break in there without any internal contacts, and I was new to the city, and relatively dumb, as well," Randazzo said.
He found a job working in the post-production department of NBC's reality TV show The Apprentice, starting his path to a high-paying position as a producer and working on other shows as well. Two years later however, he realized he didn't want to be a producer on a reality TV show and decided to work with friends at a Manhattan-based fruit basket company until he could figure out his next step. During this time that he enrolled in improv classes at the Magnet Theater in New York, and found that he loved and was good at it. There he met Carol Kolb, the former editor-in-chief of The Onion, and Amie Barrodale, the senior editor at the time.
Barrodale recommended Randazzo for the job when she left to spend several months in India. Randazzo took an editing test and was informed he got a job as the assistant editor a couple of days later. "Well, first I got a call explaining what a dumb-ass I was for not knowing how to use 'Track Changes,' then I got the call telling me I got the job," Randazzo said.
In addition to his current job at The Onion, he spends time cooking with his wife, who is a chef, and still continues performing improv at least once a week. Randazzo said Emerson "was good for work ethic and helped me to see that you can pursue a career in something you like and are good at... The relationships I made at Emerson are the most important thing."