When I last reported on the hilarious musings of the Tribune Company's new chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, little did I realize that he would provide us with a continuous comedy act of major proportions. His previous observations wandered from looking upon newspapers as the "new rock 'n' roll" to the need for soul all interspersed with quotations from everybody from John Cleese to Carl Jung. Yes, he was good for some bellylaughs but now he has exceeded himself in the inadvertent humor department with a memo to the Tribune staffers that rivals the best of comedy skits. Appropriately, Abrams announces that his job starts on April Fools Day:

...I start April 1st but I've been pretty engaged from afar. Thought I'd share some observations on TV, web and print. Small stuff, "think pieces" more than anything...not end alls, but when we re-think and maximize hundreds of little pieces within the framework of bigger pieces and it could be part of the blueprint for something very powerful:

Imagine if a comedy script is submitted to a movie producer. It would be about a major newspaper conglomerate so desperate to turn around the plunging circulation numbers of its various newspapers that it hires a wacky radio consultant as a Chief Innovation Officer to help turn it around. The radio consultant is so strange that he believes the way to improve the circulation numbers is to ensure that the newspapers have soul. He plans to do this by treating newspapers as the new rock 'n' roll.  The wacky Chief Innovation Officer announces his plans in a seemingly endless  e-mail message that wanders aimlessly for 5 web pages in which it claims that newspapers need to "morph the soul of Dylan...with with the innovation of Apple and the eccentric-all-the-way-to-the-bank of Bill Veeck." The message also conjures up "theater of the mind," Star Wars, plus a whole host of nearly indecipherable psycho-babble that includes visions of open and closed modes.

In yet another example of how the dinosaur media is completely unable to cope with the new web technology, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's editorial blog (or "blob" as editor Earl Maucker described it accurately last summer via a typo), The Slant, continues to generate almost no interest from the readers. Out of 21 entries posted to The Slant from January 16 through February 28, only three comments were left by readers. Something of an underwhelming response. Of course, it might have helped if the Sun-Sentinel actually provided a direct link to The Slant "Blob" from its opening page. Here is how the Sun-Sentinel describes The Slant which was launched last year with much hype:

In what seems to be an almost comical pattern among South Florida newspapers, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel has once again failed to apply the political party label to disgraced and imprisoned former Broward county sheriff Ken Jenne. Can you guess the political party to which Jenne belongs?

With many newspapers in a state of free-fall as far as their readership numbers go, it is interesting as well as entertaining to watch how they attempt to combat that situation. In the case of some such as my hometown newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the effort to adjust to the new realities of the Web is both awkward as well as laughable. As I pointed out in an earlier NewsBusters blog, the Sun-Sentinel came up with the idea of a "blob" called "The Slant." Here is a description of this "exciting" new feature by editor Earl Maucker:

To take advantage of the web capabilities, our editorial page editors created "The Slant", a blob [sic] devoted to opinion and commentary that goes well beyond what we offer on our printed editorial and commentary pages.

This has been happening so much in the past few years that it is reaching the point of redundancy to report on it. A politician is caught up in a major scandal and/or corruption. The media dutifully reports on it but leaves out one key factor. The political party of the fallen politician. And can you guess which political party is ALWAYS missing from these reports whenever such an affliliation is conveniently purged from the news stories?