A Ri-tronc-ulous Name Change for Baltimore Sun Owner

BALTIMORE, MD — Tribune Publishing — the company that owns the Baltimore Sun, Capital-Gazette, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers in Maryland — will change its name to tronc, Inc.

What's that, you say? A typo, perhaps? The Onion making a funny? No, it's the future of journalism.

Tronc, Inc. (dammit spellcheck, stop capitalizing that t) is a "content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels. tronc, or tribune online content, captures the essence of the Company’s mission. tronc pools the Company’s leading media brands and leverages innovative technology to deliver personalized and interactive experiences. The name change will become effective on June 20, 2016," the company announced Thursday.

Coming soon: www.tronc.com, described as a visual content portal that will curate tronc’s premium content (aka, stories from the Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Baltimore Sun and other company newspapers). 

The company announced the changes Thursday afternoon after its shareholder meeting.

The Tribune published its very first edition in Chicago on June 10, 1847. Apparently, the path from 19th century startup to nativist rag, from mercurial crusader to conservative voice, from "An American Paper for Americans" to journalistic giant, from beleaguered dinosaur to industry joke takes 169 years.

To be fair, the rapidly decaying newspaper business desperately needs innovative thinking. And many journalists and publishers are hidebound in their thinking and quick to dismiss unconventional ideas.

“Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating," Tribune Publishing Chairman Michael Ferro said in a release issued after shareholders delivered a favorable vote on his new slate of directors. "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.”

To be totally unfair, Twitter lit up with delightful ridicule at the tronc transformation.

TPUB will no longer listlessly trade on the New York Stock Exchange. (The stock closed out Thursday at $11.38 a share, down 21 cents on the day.) As of June 20, TRNC will begin racing to penny–stock status as a Nasdaq-listed security.

The company is touting these accomplishments thus far under the Ferro regime:

• reorganizing the business into new operating and reporting units to increase transparency and drive corporate focus.
• launching troncX, a content curation and monetization engine, to combine existing assets with new artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology to accelerate digital growth. The Company conducted a 30-day pilot of its AI efforts involving 1% of its traffic, delivering a 400% increase in the yield on programmatic revenue.
• partnering with Nant Capital and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to accelerate the transformation from a legacy news company to a technology and content company, including gaining access to over 100 machine vision and artificial intelligence technology patents for news media applications.

Ferro and his CEO Justin Dearborn remain virulently opposed to an attempt by Gannett to buy out Tribune Publishing. Gannett is offering $15 a share. Some significant institutional shareholders like the Gannett deal. Oaktree Capital Management and Towle & Co. have publicly urged Ferro to negotiate with Gannett. Another shareholder, Capital Structures Realty Advisors, filed a lawsuit against Tribune Publishing accusing the board of directors of violating its duty to maximize shareholder value.

Gannett's offer of $15 a share put the total value of its bid for all Tribune Publishing properties, which includes the Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, Baltimore Sun and other papers, at $864 million. Gannett's previous bid was $12.25 a share. The second bid offers a premium of 99 percent over Tribune's April 22 closing price of $7.52 a share, the last day of trading before Gannett went public with its buyout bid.

Gannett tried to turn Thursday's shareholder meeting into a symbolic referendum on its bid and Ferro's digital strategy, urging shareholders to sit out the vote on Ferro's board of director nominees. Poynter reports that Gannett claims "a majority of those shareholders who are independent of management" withheld their vote.

Gannett's effort to take over Tribune turned hostile as Ferro's reluctance to sell the company became clear. Ferro has said Gannett's bid undervalues Tribune.

Quickly, Ferro himself turned hostile, at one point saying he'd engaged lawyers to plot a takeover of Gannett, a much larger media company with a market cap of $1.81 billion.

On Wednesday night, on the eve of the shareholders meeting, the Wall Street Journal published a report on thefallout between the Tribune Publishing chairman and the chairman of Gannett, John Jeffry Louis.

As it so happens, Ferro and Louis are Gold Coast neighbors in Chicago. Occasionally, they would chat, as neighbors are wont to do.

After Gannett publicly accused Ferro of not wanting to give up control of Tribune Publishing unless he got a large "piece of the action" in return, Ferro texted Louis, reports the nation's premier business newspaper: “You’re a liar. You are a fraud. You have no business being involved with a public institution.”

Industry insiders speculate  Gannett now will wait for Ferro's strategy to play out and then swoop in when tronc goes kerplonk (which is how his attempt to digitally transform the Chicago Sun-Times ended).

— Reported by Chicago Editor Dennis Robaugh