Ending a quarter century as owner of the Daily News, publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman on Monday sold the print and digital media organization to tronc, a Chicago-based company with ambitions of reengineering the struggling newspaper industry for an electronic future.

Tronc adds The News to a stable of nine daily publications, including, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. Its corporate lineage traces to the Tribune Company, The News' longtime owner before Zuckerman.

Buying The News thrusts tronc and its chairman, investor and internet entrepreneur Michael W. Ferro, to prominence in the nation's hyper-competitive media capital. He also gains a pugnacious populist voice that strives both to entertain with flair and to inform with deeply researched facts.

The transaction shifts The News from ownership by a single, deep-pocketed patron to the organizational chart of a publicly traded corporation whose roster of newspapers is filled out by the Orlando Sentinel and Sun-Sentinel in Florida, the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., the Hartford Courant, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.