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As various other media providers have pointed out, it's not informational at all; it's a mess of nonsense buzzwords. We open with a grinning, dazed tronc-slave, clearly insensate from his addiction to whatever toxic gloop the tronc emits. "This is the future of journalism," he blathers. "This is the future of content." Another tronc-drone, more subdued, more robotic, chimes in. "It's about meeting in the middle – having a tech startup culture meet a legacy corporate culture, and then evolving and changing, and that's really the fun part." This is then followed by a map on the new cosmos: newspapers giddily wheeling around the central tronc, a glowing blue sun that nourishes them and gives them light. Some people have tried to decode these sinister transmissions; as NY Magazine points out, what tronc is actually saying is that a lot of people are likely to lose their jobs, and be replaced by automated content-optimisation software. Which should be worrying for the thousands of people who work for tronc. But it should also be worrying for you.You should fear tronc, because you love great content. Plenty of other media companies have been making fun of tronc and its rebrand into a planet-destroying monstrosity, but it's a nervous laughter, a narcissism of small differences. Tronc is the stupid edge of a wedge jammed firmly into your eyeballs. We're all at it; the entire media class is reconfiguring itself into an unholy machine god, and all your favourite websites probably employ someone who speaks the same impenetrable nonsense-jargon as the tronc does,. The basic unit of this transformation is "content". Nobody publishes essays any more, or book reviews, or films, or fiction: they curate and monetise content. This is dangerous. What it really marks is the total subjugation of content to form.
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