Tribune Interactive's The Syndicate: What is it?

Tribune Interactive released a pretty vague press release today announcing that it was launching “The Syndicate,” “a new online multimedia content marketplace bringing the latest news, lifestyle stories and sports reports to visitors of Tribune Co.’s television and newspaper Web sites.” “The content, created 24/7, is culled from Tribune’s 23 television stations and newspaper Web sites, 17 TV stations owned by Local TV LLC and various outside vendors.”

“Our mission is to super-serve our Web site visitors around the clock,” said Andy Friedman, vice president/interactive content for Tribune Interactive in the release. “We know our visitors want information that they can read and view. With The Syndicate, we keep our visitors current on what matters to them, complementing what they read with what they watch and vice versa.”

No URL was given for the site/portal. I don’t know if that means it’s not quite up yet or if it was just an oversight. A Google search didn’t turn up anything so I suspect it’s the former.

It sounds like this will be a central location for Tribune to feature its locally created content and also to allow its different media operations to share with each other. I would assume Tribune also is syndicating its online content to other Web sites, portals and networks. However, after reading this release a couple of times, I really have no idea what this thing is. If you are going to bother to put out a press release, at least be clear on what it is you are trying to say. And if I’m allowed to complain some more, don’t do it via PDF. PDFs are (purposely) the most inflexible documents in the world and they drive me nuts.

I sound really grumpy today, don’t I?