Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Lee Abrams Wants To Remake News


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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