Tribune Publishing rebrands as tronc, terrible puns ensue

Tribune Publishing, owner of newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, just announced that starting on June 20 it will rebrand as tronc*, Inc. — short for “tribune online content.”

The company is pitching this as part of its broader move to digital, which also includes the development of troncX*, a “content curation and monetization engine” that also uses artificial intelligence. In a similar vein, the company will be launching a tronc* website, which will serve as “a visual content portal” across all of the company’s titles.

Along with the rebranding, tronc is moving from the New York Stock Exchange to NASDAQ, where it will trade under the ticker symbol “TRNC.”

“Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating,” said Chairman Michael Ferro in the press release. “Our transformation strategy — which has attracted over $114 million in growth capital — 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. Our rebranding to tronc represents the manner in which we will pool our technology and content resources to execute on our strategy.”

Tribune Publishing spun out from Tribune Media back in 2014.

*Not a typo, somehow.