Tribune Publishing announces corporate rebranding, changes name to tronc

Tribune Publishing Co. has announced that the company will change its name to tronc, Inc., 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 to its 60 million monthly users. The name change will become effective on June 20.

The company also announced that it will be transferring its stock exchange listing from the New York Stock Exchange to The Nasdaq Global Select Market. tronc expects its common stock to begin trading as a Nasdaq-listed security under the new ticker symbol "TRNC" on June 20.

Chairman Michael Ferro said, "Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating. 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."

Earlier this year, the company announced a plan to transform its business. Since then, the company has made important progress, including:

• Reorganizing the business into new operating and reporting units to increase transparency and drive corporate focus.
• Launching troncX, its 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 percent of its traffic, delivering a 400 percent 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.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has also joined the company's Board of Directors as vice-chairman.

The company also plans to launch www.tronc.com, a visual content portal that will curate tronc's premium content across all of its brands in one place. The company's corporate website and investor relations pages will live within that platform after the transfer to Nasdaq on June 20.