And it certainly needs all the help it can get on innovation, and that elusive thing, motivation: Tribune has hired radio veteran Lee Abrams as its first-ever chief innovation officer, “responsible for innovation across Tribune’s publishing, broadcasting and interactive divisions.” He will start April 1. Lee was previously SVP and chief creative officer at XM Satellite Radio (NSDQ: XMSR), and was certainly a high-profile presence at industry conferences. XM and Sirius (NSDQ: SIRI) are still in a holding pattern on their merger, and probably running out of creative ideas.

Abrams told WaPo that he believes the news industry need to undergo a revolution in its creative leadership. “Over the past couple of years, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of news and information as being the new rock and roll…There had always been music, but rock and roll took it to a whole new level, broke the rules, wrote a whole new playbook.” This is his first journalism-related job, so lets hope his somewhat naive hopes are, well, proven right.

He gives some hints on his thinking, on his own blog, when he talks about slogans and marketing for newspapers: “In Newspapers: Most of them are old…real old ‘All The News That’s fit to Print’. Pretty harmless and I can’t imagine that they have any impact one way or another…The Web: THIS is where they may contribute to definition and differentiation. For example, TheDailyBugle.com doesn’t say much other than it’s the website for the Daily Bugle. Big deal. EVERY newspaper has a website. Maybe a slogan that’s not hokey, marketing speak or typical, could help define the web strategy. I don’t see any papers doing this…it’s always simply the website of the paper whereas in reality, it’s SO much more.”

Abrams is credited with inventing the “album-oriented rock” format for FM, and for giving Howard Stern his first major market job. Abrams also has been blamed for radio’s demise as one of the fathers of consultant-generated playlists, writes WaPo.