Lee Abrams left Tribune amid a serious uproar less than
three years ago, but the radio entrepreneur is back, according to adage.com, with
a project that is perhaps the most ambitious undertaking thus far in a career
that includes major roles in the creation of both Radio Disney and XM Radio.
XM, Abrams said, "wasn't really the place to reinvent
news and information," and nor was Tribune. "They went through all
the bankruptcy and craziness" while he was there, he said frankly.
"We thought we'd do it without layers and layers of history and conference
rooms full of people who were going to question it."
So he and his partner Steve Saslow have formed a newsroom
staffed by more than 100 folks from local television stations around the
country and created a user interface that can be accessed online, on mobile and
on tablets. They're calling the new product TouchVision and they're hoping to
expand to television as well. They're pitching stations with spare spectrum on
their digital subchannel frequencies—a cheap but ever-more-popular piece of
broadcast real estate.
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For those who've spent a while watching television news, a
question arises: Why bother reinventing it at all? Why not let it migrate onto
the Web? Abrams is quick with an answer: "You could drive a truck through
the potential for news among 18-44s," he said.
"You have TMZ, and it's great, and then you have Fox
News and so forth and that's great, too—very successful. There's a new
opportunity to reach the mainstream Americans who find TMZ amusing but kind of
dumb, and the [older-skewing] stuff kind of boring. We're looking for a way to
find an audience for whom there's nothing really directly servicing their
needs."
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