The company, which was acquired by Alden Global Capital in May 2021, has a portfolio that includes the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, The Virginian-Pilot, the Hartford Courant, additional titles in Pennsylvania and Virginia, syndication operations, and websites.

A native Ohioan who first acquired an interest in the Tribune in 1855, Medill gained full control of the newspaper in 1874 and ran it until his death in 1899.

In the wake of a dispute with some of its labor unions, the New York Daily News was sold to British businessman Robert Maxwell in 1991.

[9] In June 2000, Tribune acquired the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Company in a merger deal worth $8.3 billion, which was the largest acquisition in the history of the newspaper industry.

[11] The merger added seven daily newspapers to Tribune's portfolio, including the Los Angeles Times, the Long Island-based Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and the Hartford Courant.

The company sold both Newsday and AM New York to Cablevision Systems Corporation in 2008, with the sale of the latter paper closing on July 29 of that year.

[15] On December 8, 2008, faced with a high debt load totaling $13 billion, related to the company's leveraged buyout and subsequent privatization, and a sharp downturn in newspaper advertising revenue, Tribune filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in what was the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry.

[18][19] On February 26, 2013, Tribune reportedly hired investment firms Evercore Partners and J.P. Morgan & Co. to oversee the sale of its newspapers.

[29] On May 7, 2015, Tribune Publishing announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the San Diego Union-Tribune and its associated properties for $85 million, ending the paper's 146 years of private ownership.

[38] At the time in 2016 that the company moved into calling itself tronc, chief technology officer Malcolm CasSelle and chief digital officer Anne Vasquez announced to employees initiatives in content optimization, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and increasing the amount of video to 50% of all content by 2017, in an effort to increase reader engagement and ad revenue.

[40][41][42] On August 7, 2016, while criticising several aspects of a corporate restructuring that went along with the rebranding (for instance a shift of focus away from hard news towards usage maximization, which he perceived as undue), satirist John Oliver mocked this new name as "the sound an ejaculating elephant makes", and (ironically) "the sound of a stack of newspapers hitting a dumpster.

[50][38] On June 19, 2018, it was reported that tronc would revert its name back to Tribune Publishing;[51] this would be confirmed by the company in October of that year.

In December 2019, Alden Global Capital, a New York City-based hedge fund, acquired a 32% stake in shares of Tribune Publishing Company.

Knight was replaced by the chief financial officer, Terry Jimenez.Tribune Publishing CEO Tim Knight steps down in management shake-up In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tribune Publishing closed a number of its papers' newsrooms, including those of: the New York Daily News, The Morning Call, the Orlando Sentinel, the Carroll County Times, the Capital Gazette and the Hartford Courant.

[5] A key element in concluding the sale to Alden was the decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owned 24% of the company's stock, to abstain from the May 21 shareholder vote.

[3] In early April 2021, Tribune Publishing announced that it has entered into serious discussions with an alternative pair of suitors for an amount higher than its deal with Alden.

The transitional-services agreement would have involved payments from the Sun to Alden for logistical aspects of running the business including its payroll and circulation departments and national and digital sales unit.

[59] Poynter.org observed that fears about the potential Alden acquisition may have obscured that staffing levels at Tribune Publishing's nine metropolitan newspapers fell 30.4% from 2019 to 2020.

They write, "Employees and local readers are concerned that Alden would make deep cuts to Tribune if it bought the company.

Shortly thereafter, Tribune Publishing said that it was ending its conversations with Stewart W. Bainum Jr. because they believed that this possible deal could not reasonably be expected, in the absence of Wyss, to lead to a "superior proposal".

[61] In the wake of the May 21 finalized sale, Bainum expressed continued interest in purchasing the Baltimore Sun and indicated that if he is unable to do so, he might invest a significant sum in creating a digital alternative.

[62] On January 15, 2024, the company sold The Baltimore Sun to David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group.