Tag: Chicago

Tribune gets Troncked

Seth Anderson0 comment

Tribune Tower
Tribune Tower

World class editor’s note: from the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Ken Doctor

In a move that, even amid all the nastiness of the Tribune/Gannett war, we would still have to consider stunning, Tribune Publishing has renamed itself — to tronc. In a memo to Tribune staff this afternoon, CEO Justin Dearborn wrote:

Today, I am pleased to announce another important step in our transformation — the renaming of our Company to tronc, or tribune online content. At our core, we remain a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels. This rebranding acknowledges our important evolution as a company and captures the essence of our vision for the future.

Editor’s note: Because we do not hate our readers, Nieman Lab style from here on out will be a capitalized Tronc, no matter what the company insists — just as we have long killed the exclamation point in Yahoo and refused to render “Politico” in all caps, and just as we sliced out the old slash in Recode before that company came around to the same idea.

In a war of corporate naming, it’s apparently a race to the bottom. Tronc joins the two-year-old ex-Gannett broadcast company Tegna [or TEGNA! —Ed.] in the pantheon of odd corporate naming. Fast followers of the Tribune Publishing saga will recall that a month ago Tribune chairman Michael Ferro and his hand-picked CEO Justin Dearborn had outlined Tribune’s latest turnaround strategy around a Tronc “content monetization engine.” Now Tronc — a logo and an idea on a whiteboard — has swallowed Tribune itself. Tribunites become Troncites.

(click here to continue reading Tribune gets Troncked: A reader’s guide to the Tribune/Gannett war » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Tronc is probably the most ridiculous name I’ve encountered in a while. I’m guessing Michael Ferro came up with it in a fever dream, but I could be wrong. Maybe they focus-grouped Tronc for 6 weeks, and this is the best the Tribune brain trust could come up with.

City’s First Kava Bar Hits West Town

Seth Anderson0 comment

The grizzled editor of this blog is inexplicably fond of alliteration despite everyone’s best efforts to dissuade him. Hence, today’s broadly assigned topic Food, Film and Photography.

Patience please
Patience please…

I’ve never sampled kava, but I’ve long wanted to. Apparently, the universe listened to this request, and not my other one of discovering millions of gold coins in a rusting suitcase… 

A juice bar serving nonalcoholic drinks made with kava root — offering a natural remedy for anxiety and a buzz minus the hangover, among other claims  — has been steadily gaining converts since opening in March, according to Tropikava Kafe & Juice Bar owner Jeff Ramsey.

Drinking kava has been described by one user “as if alcohol, marijuana and coffee had one wild night and created the sedating, antidepressant drink.”

Ramsey said the feeling a person gets while drinking kava is “a euphoria that makes you mellow.”

“Here, it’s about relaxing, enjoying and socializing,” he said of the 25-seat cafe, where patrons can sit on couches or at the long bar and drink kava together. Since the cafe is BYO, some patrons also bring in wine and champagne and mix it with their kava, Ramsey said.

On Wednesday, Ramsey said he had just catered a midday kava event for workers at a Downtown architectural firm arranged by a woman who has become a regular at Tropikava, located at 1115 N. Hermitage Ave., just south of Division Street in West Town.

(click here to continue reading City’s First Kava Bar, Offering A ‘Natural’ Buzz, Hits West Town – East Village – DNAinfo Chicago.)

Maybe this weekend?

As Though Nothing Was Wrong was uploaded to Flickr

eggplant0 comment

balcony, Lincoln Park somewhere near (or in) Terra Cotta Row.


Founded in Chicago in 1878 by a group of investors including John R. True, this company became a major producer of terra cotta trimmings used by the construction industry. By the early 1890s, when Northwestern Terra Cotta employed approximately 500 men, annual sales approached $600,000. By 1910, its large plant at Clybourn and Wrightwood Avenues had about 1,000 workers. The popularity of placing terra cotta moldings on building facades peaked in the 1920s, and Northwestern Terra Cotta led the way, in Chicago and around the country. Around this time, the company opened plants in St. Louis and Denver. Beginning with Louis Sullivan earlier in the century, prominent Chicago architects like Frank Lloyd Wright had extensive contracts with the company. Included among the many landmark Chicago buildings for which Northwestern supplied extensive decorative moldings were the Civic Opera House, the Chicago Theater, the Wrigley Building, and the Randolph Tower. Northwestern’s operations in Chicago declined alongside the construction industry during Great Depression and never returned to their 1920s levels. In 1965, Northwestern Terra Cotta Co.’s only remaining plant, in Denver, closed.

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I took As Though Nothing Was Wrong on April 19, 2014 at 07:38AM

and processed it in my digital darkroom on April 03, 2016 at 11:04PM