Abrams Unbound
In a modest, cluttered office on the sixth floor of Chicago’s Tribune Tower, the future of American newspapers looks to its past. It is here that Lee Abrams, a former radio consultant and the new “chief innovation officer” for the Tribune Company, seeks inspiration in stacks of yellowing front pages. He likes old-school screaming headlines, he says, front-page cartoons, the tradition of reporters as stars. Then, on his computer screen, he clicks through PDFs showing bold new page designs for what he calls the “relaunching” of the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, and eight other American newspapers that came under his creative aegis in April of this year.

Abrams, silver-haired and mustachioed, talks about the future of newspapers with the unbound enthusiasm of a college student. In his day-to-day uniform of black long-sleeved T-shirt and dark slacks, he finds himself a stranger among the oxford-cloth inhabitants of the newsroom. He doesn’t look like them and he doesn’t speak their language, but to his and everyone’s surprise, Abrams is suddenly one of the most prominent people in newspaper publishing—and certainly among the busiest.

This summer, just past the midpoint in print journalism’s annus horribilis—an analyst quoted in The New York Times called it “the worst year for the newspaper business since the Depression”—you would have needed a GPS to track the frenetic, fifty-five-year-old Abrams: en route from Chicago to Baltimore to see the redesigns at the Sun, descending through the smoggy skies above lax, ready to bust through the creative vapor lock at the Los Angeles Times—meeting-and-greeting and piping up about the need for the newspaper to “own” entertainment coverage (and paint their executives’ big black SUVS with colorful logos). In Hartford and Allentown, as well as Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, he flew in on similar missions. And...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.