Rebranding exercise: publishing’s midlife crisis

Tribune Publishing, owners of venerable newspaper titles including The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Time, has announced that it is changing its name and no longer wants to be known as a newspaper publisher. The new name is tronc Inc (small “t”, capital “I”, if you please) and you can forget all that old world media stuff because it’s now a “content curation and monetization company”.

tronc (short for Tribune Online Content) might be seen by some as a desperate effort to modernise its image an ailing industry with a “cool” new name.

I’m not sure how tronc sold the name to their investors but I imagine the conversation might have gone along the same lines as when former English teacher, Gordon Sumner, told his mother he was quitting his job, joining a band called The Police and that he now wanted to be called Sting.

“That’s nice Gordon.”

You might also be reminded of other corporate midlife crisis that lead to a change of name. Like the time when PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) tried to get hip with the dot.com kids at the turn of the century by rebranding themselves as Monday.

Others (the less cynical amongst you) might see it as a serious effort to re-invent itself as a digital media brand and distance itself from the declining print business model.

Social media has, off course, been quick to poke fun at the name change.

On this side of the Atlantic we’re seeing publishers making very similar moves into the digital arena. The Independent has famously thrown its entire future hopes into digital while a more cautious approach at The Guardian suggests they are now committed to managing decline in the print sector, although we haven’t quite got to the stage where they are changing their names.

In the future, could we see the Daily Mail and General Trust change to D-Trust, Trinity Mirror to TRIMor (it’s certainly looking a litter trimmer these days thanks to a serious of newspaper closures) and the Guardian Media Group rebranded to GUMP?

Before they do anything so stupid, they might want to ask the question: What’s in a name?

The answer is: History, credibility, trust, recognition. Tronc might have just thrown that in the trash along with their long-term future in the publishing industry.