By Emma Krupp

Last week, SEC filings revealed Michael Ferro, the beleaguered former chairman of Tronc, had sold his stake in the company to the tune of $208.6 million. The billionaire-turned-media mogul stepped down from his position in late March amid sexual harassment allegations first reported by Fortune magazine.

Logistics aside — there’s still the small issue of the $5 million yearly paycheck he’ll receive until 2020 as a contracted consultant for the company, for instance — Ferro’s ouster is a welcome change for journalists at The Chicago Tribune and Tronc’s collection of media properties in nine other cities, who have watched with apprehension over the past two years as the 51-year-old businessman set out to “save” journalism.

Originally a tech entrepreneur, Ferro stepped into the news business in 2011 as the lead investor in Wrapports, a holding company that left him in charge of the Chicago Sun-Times. As part of Wrapports, Ferro coasted through a sputtering reign that involved a handful of shiny and largely ineffectual new ventures, including hiring a cachet of celebrity writers and launching the news content aggregator Sun Times Network, which former managing editor Craig Newman called “a unmitigated disaster.”

But in early 2016, Ferro donated his Wrapports stock to an unnamed charity and crossed the river to assume his role as chairman of Tronc — then still “Tribune Publishing” — with a newfound verve for the industry.

“Instead of playing golf and doing stuff, this is my project — journalism,” Ferro told the Tribune in an interview at the time. “We all want to do something great in life. Just because you made money, is that what your kids are going to remember you for? Journalism is important to save right now.”

Journalism is important to save right now. What, exactly, does it mean to “save journalism,” and why did Michael Ferro — with a background in tech and one other botched media venture —  imagine himself qualified to do so? Ferro, the Tribune’s self-proclaimed knight in shining armor, steamrolled forward with a collection of misguided attempts at rebranding, among them talks of using artificial intelligence to publish thousands of videos a day and, most infamously, creating the bizarre portmanteau “tronc.”

Wealthy investors and entrepreneurs have long been involved in news ownership, and reporters are no strangers to the corporatization of their industry —  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for a cool $250 million, and Joe Ricketts, whose relative unobtrusiveness was often touted as his best quality as the owner of the hyperlocal news outlets Gothamist and DNAinfo, shuttered the websites last year with no prior notice to writers and staff.

But while it’s one thing for a newsroom to be subjected to the capricious whims of investment and capitalism, it’s another entirely for those whims to be executed in the name of saving journalism. In painting himself as some kind of journalistic martyr with a multimillion dollar salary, Ferro spat on the work of those whose reporting he professed to be so desperate to save — particularly amid simultaneous waves of layoffs and downsizing within Tronc newsrooms.

Ferro’s right about one thing: the media industry faces innumerable uphill battles, and journalism remains important to save right now and always. Indeed, as the Tribune’s newsroom moves forward with efforts to unionize, one of its key goals is to push back against the strictures of corporate ownership. To save the news, it seems, we’ll have to do so ourselves.