Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Tronc.

Few words have garnered as much hilarity in such a short period of time.

On Thursday, Tribune Publishing announced that the historic media company would rename itself "tronc." Media Twitter nearly lost its mind. For hours after the announcement, the jokes rolled in. They're still going strong as of Friday morning.

Disastrous company rebrandings aren't particularly new, even for newspaper companies. Gannett, which publishes USA Today, spun off its digital businesses into something called TEGNA. None of them drew quite the ridicule that tronc elicited. And since it's Friday, here's 30 of the best tronc jokes from Twitter....

One of the hottest new apps set to debut this week at SXSW, that annual intermingling of tenuous ideas and easy money, was LIVR, a social network exclusively for drunk people. Media and investors alike lined up to laud it....

"I've worked closely enough with media, and I've done enough of this sort of thing before, to know that the media would blindly jump at it. I was more surprised when people did reach out to me; I can count on one hand the number of outlets that bothered to call me up.

The media in a way allows this to happen to themselves... The media will just jump at a juicy story and not look deeper into it. I think it's because a lot of people working at these blogs and media outlets are overworked and underpaid. Especially around an event at SXSW, they need to crank out story after story. So it's kind of like this cheapening journalism. I don't know if they can even be called journalists anymore; it's more media as a mouthpiece for the companies that want to get a message out."...