The brain trust at Tribune Publishing knew that modern-day economics don’t work for regional newspapers. So they had to innovate. Thus was born tronc, the new name for Tribune Publishing. tronc stands for “Tribune online content,” and should be capitalized under no circumstance whatsoever—even when it’s the first word in a sentence.

The lower-case name, the pledge to use artificial intelligence in the production of news, and the online promotional video seemed straight out of The Office, and all made tronc a comfortable punch line.

But snicker at your own risk. The privations of the past decade and a half have unleashed nothing if not a stream of flimsy would-be innovations. They come in all forms, from new ways of deploying editorial resources to strategies for creating audience to interesting ways to exploit the power and lucre of video. And that’s before we even start talking about native advertising.

So many of the approaches have fizzled (including the expected purchase of tronc by Gannett) that, as a public service, we offer this starter list of Media-Innovation-Don’ts... [Read more]