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San Diego Union-Tribune’s seeming absence from Tribune Co's. makeover video explained
“No, seriously: ‘Tronc' stands for Tribune Online Content”
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New tronc mascot Tronc the troll. “Using a monster from The Fellowship of the Ring may seem like a counterintuitive choice,” says tronc Desperation Manager Ernest Layoff, “but if you stop to think about it, you remember that cave trolls are extremely powerful. And while you wouldn’t want it to get out of hand, it does have a chain around its neck that makes it both useful and manageable…to an extent. We think that expresses the new platform pretty much perfectly." -
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." -
In this scene from the tronc employee video, Tronc the troll is seen optimizing some content for premium sharability and engagement by smashing it with his video-conversion clickhammer. “Tronc knows that people like to look at pretty moving pictures more than they like to summon up images based on words,” explains tronc Desperation Manager Ernest Layoff. “And this image really helps to make that clear. The universe of textual content is black and white and empty and totally uninteresting, but when Tronc starts in optimizing, suddenly, there’s an explosion of interest, tons of energy, and radiating rays of user reach. Great job, Tronc!"