Media event horizon: In this screen cap from the tronc employee video depicting content optimization, tronc media properties are shown in orbit around the great tronc infotainment hub, everything from the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to the Allentown Morning Call and the Hartford Courant. But where, wondered San Diegans, was our beloved U-T? Did it not have a place in the exciting new tronciverse? Was it doomed to the printy past? Happily, the answer was “not quite.” Using an electron microscope, scientists at the Columbia School of Journalism were able to zoom in on a seemingly insignificant star in the mind-boggling void of untronced space. As magnification increased, the “star” was revealed to be a massive black newshole, surrounded by a bright rim of deeply distorted data. “A black newshole is a market or news organ so devoid of interest that it actually bends news into itself and keeps it from escaping into the world of sharable content,” explained tronc Twitterer-in-Chief Tammy Retweetenheim. "From a distance, it may look like a star, but that’s just the media event horizon surrounding its endless emptiness — the so-called ‘point of no return’ for a content creator. It actually warps our perception of stories. And it was there, carrying those stories and also some op-ed columns about the Chargers, that we found the San Diego Union-Tribune. Once we spotted it, it confirmed a lot of theories, both about San Diego and its media makeup. We couldn’t be more excited."
Posted July 1, 2016