Dive Brief:
- Tribune Publishing Co., is undergoing a major rebranding effective June 20 to tronc, Inc. The name reflects “tribune online content” shortened and represents a new business model for the company as “a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels,” as described in a statement.
- The company will also be moving from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq Global Select Market as “TRNC” on June 20 as well.
- Tribune announced a plan to transform its business earlier this year, including launching a content curation and monetization engine, and reorganizing into new operating and reporting units.
Dive Insight:
In a statement regarding the change, Chairman Michael Ferro explained the motive behind the rebrand was a belief that the greater media industry is a point where an innovative and different approach to how it operates is necessary.
"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," Ferro said. "Our rebranding to tronc represents the manner in which we will pool our technology and content resources to execute on our strategy."
As the company shifts to a more digital approach, focused on content curation, its rebranding was met with some confusion. Whether the renaming was necessary, as the Wall Street Journal notes, there is a pattern of media companies in the past changing their monikers to represent splits or organizational changes. And further, since Ferro took his post as chairman earlier this year, he has made a series of changes to the company, including instating a digital-first strategy.
If nothing else, tronc quickly caught the attention of the media on Twitter on Thursday, who took to social media with their thoughts about the new moniker:
I'm flying home. Sitting next to a high-ranking media exec who'll remain nameless. When she read about #Tronc, she started laughing out loud
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 3, 2016
As a legacy media person myself, I hate to say it, but if I had a pet dinosaur, I'd probably name it #tronc, too. https://t.co/Oaz3dvhlSH
— Ellen Gray (@elgray) June 2, 2016
