This is why we can’t have nice things, everybody:

Tribune Publishing, the parent company that owns several storied and proud newspapers in the US including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, announced on Thursday that it would be changing its name to “tronc Inc.”

That’s with one lowercase t and one uppercase I.

In a press release, the company said that tronc Inc would be “a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels”.

The name, according to the release, is a shortening of Tribune Online Content.

“tronc pools the company’s leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences to its 60m monthly users,” the release continued, using the lower-case t despite the word coming at the beginning of the sentence.

Ooooh “content curation and monetization”! Just what consumers have been clamoring for! Call me old-fashioned but I don’t want “personalized and interactive experiences.” I just want the fucking news. Is that so hard?

Twitter, of course, went apeshit.


Filed under media, Media

6 responses to “troncitis

  1. Well said, SB. Tronc sounds like a disease, all right. As someone who remembers when the Tribune was a great newspaper (except for the editorial page), it is very sad to watch as it has been cannibalized first by Sam Zell, then by this moron Michael Ferro.

  2. I prefer news, stories and journalism to “content.”

  3. Kosh III

    I’m trying to reply but the brain is just too boggled by the gobbledygook.

  4. Bob Fischer

    Great. More crap opinions masquerading as news.

  5. Kathleen

    Mmmmm. tronc hungry for curated content. Puts iron in tronc’s blood.

  6. Larry

    I think there must be some website called a Gobbledygook Generator. You feed it a few key buzz words, click the “Confuse Me!” button and it creates whole sentences a la the above utter rubbish.

    Echoing other comments, here, this announcement reminds me of my saintly old-school grandfather who, even in the 1960s, would get all po’ed at the local weatherman, working with a magic marker and easel on TV. My granddad (he looked like Popeye) would lean forward in his recliner and yell at the screen, “Just tell me if it’s gonna rain!!” I believe that, even today, that’s all we really want to know.