Tribune Co. 'Chief Innovation Officer' Delivers More Laugh Lines

[YankeeFan]

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/05/25/tribune-co-chief-innovation-officer-delivers-more-laugh-lines

Wow.  Wouldn't want this guy making decisions that impacted my life.

Here's his take on how to improve sports:


LOGOS OF SPORTS TEAMS. I rarely see logos of Sports teams on the Sports pages? I'd think that those are powerful symbols you'd WANT on your page. Also maybe dividing local pro sports and local amateur sports, so you can suggest super coverage of both...I know that may be done right now, but it might just need that 2x4. Maybe you can better OWN each by dividing the section and really bringing those logos into front and center. Sports logos are flags for people...display their flag!

[SF_Express]

Yeah, I read that whole thing. Some weird stuff in there.

[Michael_ Gee]

     For half the price and a steady supply of Bekaa valley hash, anyone on this board could come up with weirder and better ideas.

[OnTheRiver]

Dude looks sort of like Ron Jeremy.

[YankeeFan]

Dude looks sort of like Ron Jeremy.

I noticed that too.

[SixToe]

Jeremy displayed his flag, or mast, a lot. Maybe this guy took a hint.

Putting logos of teams with roundups or notes packages, maybe. As a show of "support" or to "wave the flag," take it back to the innovation center, fanboi.

[Write-brained]

If this guy were posting like THAT here, anonymously, he'd have zero credibility.

Yet somehow he's in charge of innovation at one of the country's largest newspaper chains.

[Moondoggy]

This assclown is just typical of the foofs running newspapers today. They throw stuff at the wall in the name of "innovation" and when that doesn't work they say the newsroom didn't execute it properly. These idiots have no clue, really, what they're doing; they're simply guessing, and they find receptive audiences in the glass suites because those idiots think that blowing the newspaper apart is the best way to increase readership and money. And we wonder why the industry is in the shape it's in. I've never seen any industry so eager to kill itself as newspapers seem to be.

[Metin Eniste]

Yeah, let's keep doing exactly what we're doing, because that's working out so well for us.

I realize that this memo is all over the map, but we damn well better come up with new ideas. Not one job will be saved by calling him a fanboy or an assclown, or sniffing that he mentioned what Ward Cleaver did in 1956 when (gasp!) Leave It to Beaver didn't premiere until 1957.

[Write-brained]

Yeah, let's keep doing exactly what we're doing, because that's working out so well for us.

No shit, sherlock. But if you want to listen to every idiot who writes like THIS and backs every point with rhetoric rather than facts, you go right ahead.

[Piotr Rasputin]

I think he's really smart and his ideas are excellent. You bozos should listen. [/mr.scottnewman]

[Metin Eniste]

I take the time to listen to an array of people. I find that to be more helpful than knee-jerk bitching about assclowns in glass offices.

[SixToe]

Listening is fine. Listening is a good thing.

Dismissing assclowns with stupid ideas that will not work is one result, though.

[Write-brained]

I take the time to listen to an array of people. I find that to be more helpful than knee-jerk bitching about assclowns in glass offices.

That memo was knee-jerk bitching, but put your pedestal anywhere you want.

[zebracoy]

To be honest, I don't disagree with him. I find that some of the most visually-appealing graphics packages include, at least in part, the logo of the two teams competing that day. The Detroit Free Press and the Boston Globe are two that immediately come to mind.

[WriteThinking]

Yeah, let's keep doing exactly what we're doing, because that's working out so well for us.

I realize that this memo is all over the map, but we damn well better come up with new ideas. Not one job will be saved by calling him a fanboy or an assclown, or sniffing that he mentioned what Ward Cleaver did in 1956 when (gasp!) Leave It to Beaver didn't premiere until 1957.

I, too, try to read and be open to everything, just because it's clear that we need to do something, and I am casting about and thinking through everything while on something of a personal mission to actually try to come with ideas that will, in fact, be helpful.

I'd seriously like to do that, both for Abrams' paper, which I have always loved, and, for the industry in general.

But Abrams has become famous for these types of memos. And although he seems like a guy people could like and work with, he speaks far too generally, and, as someone else described it, fan-boyishly, to really be effective and make an impact in any truly identifiable and quantifiable way.

He strikes me more as a public-relations guy than an actual chief innovation officer who might actually be in the process of executing or doing any of these things, or other things, that might or might not work. He spends far too much time serving as the Times' face of innovation, when what he should actually be doing is working on the innovations.

[Ace]

To be honest, I don't disagree with him. I find that some of the most visually-appealing graphics packages include, at least in part, the logo of the two teams competing that day. The Detroit Free Press and the Boston Globe are two that immediately come to mind.

I don't think using logos in roundups and preview boxes and such is great. It's the "showing the flag" BS that is the turnoff.

As if the only reason newspaper circulation is declining is that people didn't realize that the Chicago Tribune didn't cover the Cubs because there weren't enough logos.

[fishwrapper]

You're obviously not an Innovator.

[21]

To be honest, I don't disagree with him. I find that some of the most visually-appealing graphics packages include, at least in part, the logo of the two teams competing that day. The Detroit Free Press and the Boston Globe are two that immediately come to mind.

I don't think using logos in roundups and preview boxes and such is great. It's the "showing the flag" BS that is the turnoff.

As if the only reason newspaper circulation is declining is that people didn't realize that the Chicago Tribune didn't cover the Cubs because there weren't enough logos.

If the Tribune's Cubs coverage doesn't already cause enough cynicism, can't wait to see how they further OWN the 'super coverage' of the the team they actually OWN.

[Write-brained]

Had no idea he was the innovator behind Dahl's Disco Demolition Night at old Comiskey Park. His credibility just keeps rising in my eyes. 

A little more from Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune:



'So much TV news seems stuck in 1974. It's almost a parody of itself sometimes," Lee Abrams said Friday. "You just want to roll your eyes."

Come next month, Abrams takes on the newly created title of chief innovation officer at Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co. and takes on conventional thinking at WGN-Ch. 9 and 22 other TV stations, along with the company's newspapers, WGN-AM 720 and sundry other media properties.

"At least go through the exercise of rethinking it a little bit," said Abrams, who has been chief creative officer for XM Satellite Radio since its launch in 1998. "There's a consultant-driven TV news playbook that all the stations [use]. It's almost as if [consultant] Frank Magid has hypnotized every news director in the country.

"It's sort of like radio. One of the reason music radio is so bad in most people's opinion is it's gotten so overresearched and overconsulted ... to the point where it's unlistenable."

That Abrams, 55, has come to this conclusion is a prime example of the kind of rethinking he wants.

Abrams, you see, was one of the founding fathers of radio research and for years among the industry's most influential. He was among the first to compile volumes of audience research, tailoring formats and playlists to suit them.

He gets widely credited with developing FM's album-oriented rock format.

He gets widely blamed for stifling free-form progressive rock on FM.

More than 300 stations took their cues from him before he walked away from the consulting business.

"I'm making amends for it with XM," he said. "Back then, when I started, what radio needed was discipline. It was all over the place, and we disciplined it. And now, or 10 years ago, we needed to unwind that discipline."

There has been considerable speculation over where at Tribune Co. his impact will be first felt.

Although Abrams gave both Steve Dahl and Howard Stern their first major-market radio jobs, Dahl and former partner Garry Meier aren't getting reunited on Tribune's WGN-AM any time soon.

Meier has reached out to Abrams about potential work. But Dahl, heard mornings on WJMK-FM 104.3, is under contract to CBS Radio for another 40 months.

Like pal Randy Michaels, Tribune Co.'s chief executive of interactive and broadcasting, Abrams looks to use the company's six smaller papers as a lab. Successful experiments will be shared with the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and New York's Newsday.

"Can't do anything too radical right away," said Abrams, a White Sox fan who grew up in Flossmoor.

When he was starting at the pay-radio service XM, he had his staff come to his home with artifacts of their old radio stations, such as memos and T-shirts, which he doused with kerosene out back and torched as a "symbol of how the world is changing."

Abrams, who was one of the architects of Dahl's Disco Demolition Night at old Comiskey Park, does not yet have plans to blow anything up at Tribune Co.

Not literally, anyway.

But, like everything else, that could change.

[DanOregon]

Anybody get the idea that charlatans are beginning to feast on the newspaper industry selling all manner of "medical cures" in bright shiny bottles and publishers are pushing each other to get to the front of the line?

[fishwrapper]

I don't know if you guys have spent time reading those posts/blogs by Lee Abrams.
There is a theme. Only one theme. Many ideas are retreads. Many are tinkering. Many wouldn't work. Many are, "Wow, these guys have been trying." Some are rudiment, coming from someone outside the profession.
The common theme? Newspapers. For some reason, he believes in them.

Now, that may make him the last to the party or he really is nuts. But he believes in the core readership growing the other arms of the company.
I don't know about the rest of you. For five years I've been told I'm a failure. My industry is a failure. My profession is a failure. Our business models are failures. I've watched friend after colleague walk out the door. I've been told we won't be around in five more years. It's old. Tiresome.

He's a fan of what we do.
You say: "Consider the source."
I say: "Fuck it. I'll take it."

[dixiehack]

I'm stunned that blog's comment section didn't suffer Wenal failure.

[Tom Petty]

Dude looks sort of like Ron Jeremy.

you mean the SE in eugene?

[Rex Harrison]

Thank you, Mario! But our princess says you're a fucking idiot!