Tribune Publishing baffles everyone by changing name to tronc

Tribune Publishing, the storied newspaper brand behind some of the nation's biggest broadsheets, is now tronc, a "content curation and monetization company" with a head-scratching name that might sound better suited for a cartoon caveman.

The rebrand, announced in a press release bogged down by jargon Thursday afternoon, triggered an instant wave of mockery from Twitter's media watchers as people tried to make sense of the inexplicable decision. 

In addition to the marketing overhaul, tronc (yes, that's supposed to be lowercase) will move its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq. The changes go into effect later this month.

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The move is yet another sign of the desperation felt in the newspaper industry -- and news media industry at large -- as it scrambles to find a viable means of replacing dwindling ad revenues.

“Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating," said a statement from Tribune chairman Michael Ferro, a Chicago entrepreneur who became the company's biggest shareholder earlier this year. 

As far as changes to the company's editorial operations, which include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, Ferro explains in a long-winded sentence that the new plan "is focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the user experience and better monetize our world-class content in order to deliver personalized content to our 60 million monthly users and drive value for all of our stakeholders."

The centerpiece of that strategy seems to be a proprietary piece of software called troncX, launched earlier this year, that is described as a "curation and monetization engine." The company said early tests on 1% of traffic yielded a 400% boost in programatic ad revenue.

The move comes as tronc struggles to fend off a potential takeover bid from newspaper giant Gannett, which owns USA Today. Ferro reportedly responded to that offer with a vow to buy Gannett, a merger considered to be implausible given the companies' respective sizes.

Here's a pretty representative sampling of the mockery doled out on Twitter following Thursday's news:

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