• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 8, 2016

After skewering obvious targets like politics, sports, and the advertising industry, it was only a matter of time before newspapers came in for the John Oliver treatment, meaning a good 20 minutes of extended explanatory mocking on his HBO news comedy show “Last Week Tonight.”

While most of the segment was actually sympathetic enough, the acerbic Brit couldn’t resist drive-bys on some of the industry’s worst self-inflicted wounds, including -- oh, joy! -- the massively misconceived rebranding of Tribune Publishing as “tronc” (a word that media bloggers are gradually realizing will always need to appear in quotation marks).

As noted, the sassy Englishman had mostly good things to say about newspapers, though not the state of the business.

For example, he hammered away at newspapers' importance as the primary producers of the news media food chain: a quick roundup of clips from TV news programs shows how much broadcast reporting is based on newspaper journalism. Oliver gives a nod to the new generation of digital news sites, but notes that the number producing original journalism remains relatively small, and is nowhere near enough to make up for troubled newspapers.

And oh, such troubles they are. The brutal numbers cited by Oliver toward the beginning of the segment don’t lie: while newspapers added about $1.4 billion in digital ad revenues from 2004 to 2014, they lost a cool $30 billion in print ad revenues, a dynamic which Oliver likened to “finding a lucky penny on the sidewalk, on the same day your bank account is drained by a 16-year-old Belgian hacker.” No surprise, then, newspapers have been cutting staff left and right and giving their remaining personnel more and more duties, from blogging and social media to video production -- and, in at least one case (the Boston Globe) actually delivering the papers.

Oliver also explains some of the more insidious effects of the drive for clicks, including the dumbing down (my phrase, not his) of news with social media-friendly non-stories about cute pets and the like. This part of the rant provides a perfect opportunity to revisit one of the last decade’s great moments in journalism, when Sam Zell, who helped steer the old Tribune Co. into bankruptcy, effectively told a reporter at the Orlando Sentinel that stories about puppies are as important as news about Iraq, before capping it off with the pithy rejoinder, “Fuck you.”

Tragicomically, that was just the beginning of Tribune’s woes, as Oliver goes on to explore the train wreck of a rebranding recently foisted on the company by its new owner, tech entrepreneur Michael Ferro. “Tronc,” short for “Tribune Online Content,” sounds more like the noise an elephant would make during an orgasm, according to Oliver (and here he is probably being too kind). An even richer target is the inane video that accompanied the rebranding, laden as it was with media tech gobbledygook about funnels, engagement and optimization, all “explained” by mystifying digital animations.

What comes next for “Tronc” is anyone’s guess. More troubling, as Oliver notes, is the fate of another newspaper bought by a rich owner, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, acquired by casino magnate and GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson in rather sketchy fashion late last year. In case anyone was wondering whether Adelson intended to use his ownership of the newspaper to influence the newspaper’s editorial approach, the answer is a resounding “yes,” according to former employees who spilled the beans about how coverage is manipulated at Adelson’s behest.

So what’s the solution for all this? Oliver wisely doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but suggests that a big part of it will involve news consumers -- at which point he indicates us, the audience -- paying for news. In my humble op-ed, it might have been a good opportunity to also mention the importance of not using ad blockers, but despite this omission, the segment ends on a high note with a great satirical trailer for an updated version of the movie “Spotlight,” starring comedian Jason Sudeikis as a newspaper editor who nixes coverage of municipal corruption in favor of, yes, cat videos.