TRONC.

Anyone who follows media types probably noticed a great disturbance on Thursday evening, as if thousands of voices logged onto Twitter to make the same joke.

In a memo I've read six times and still find almost completely incomprehensible, Tribune Publishing CEO Justin Dearborn announced that the company would rebrand itself as "tronc"—short for "Tribune online content"—to better reflect its status as a "content curation and monetization company":

Someday, some enterprising scholar will chart the linguistic devolution from "journalism" to "content," which inherently implies that everything—from the most deeply reported story to the frothiest piece of aggregation—is a discrete chunk of piping hot media to be devoured on the same platter. But since journalists have long since grown used to this kind of nonsense, the broad reaction was less existential despair and more "hahahhahaha, TRONC."

Is Your Old Disney Junk Worth Anything? (No. Of Course Not)

Have you ever seen Antiques Roadshow? It's that pre-Kardashian reality show in which a regular Joe or Jane asks a stuffy appraiser to tell them whether the sterling bowl or cuckoo clock or mahogany trunk that's been sitting in their attic is secretly an uber-rare antique. Sometimes people bring in old junk that turns out to be valued at thousands of dollars! And sometimes stuff is worth like twenty bucks. It's great.

Now imagine someone wandering up to the Antiques Roadshow judges with a dog-eared VHS copy of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and being absolutely shocked when it doesn’t get appraised at $10,000.

Dumb as that sounds, it happened earlier this week, when a few misleading blog posts raised the possibility that Disney's "Black Diamond" VHS tapes were selling for thousands of dollars. Since pretty much everybody who grew up in the 1990s has at least a couple of those Disney tapes lying around somewhere, hooray! We're all rich, right? (Not, of course, if you bother to look at the actual selling prices for these movies on eBay, which generally falls between $5 and $20—but that didn’t stop any get-rich-quickers from fantasizing about their quick riches.)

This kind of thing happens all the time on the Dumb Internet. In fact, it happened again this very same week, when a couple bragged about snagging one of those Princess Diana Beanie Babies for around $15—a Beanie Baby some lazy and/or unscrupulous news outlets reported was worth as much as $93,000. (Actual value, for what it's worth: Between $5 and $40.)