Call it Top Design Newspapers. Seven of Tribune Company’s daily metro papers have gone through major redesigns. As the Los Angeles Times overhaul nears completion, Lee Abrams is defending the choices the company made and insists that the overwhelming criticism that greeted the plans when they were announced back in June have dissipated. 

More after the jump.

Back in July,  Lee Abrams answered detractors by saying, in effect, the old model needed to be destroyed so that the newspapers could be saved. At the time, some staffers and industry said plans to slash news pages and calls for productivity measurements would be the death of the newspapers. There were also concerns that the quality of some Tribune papers’ brands could be compromised if forced to shift resources from time-consuming investigative pieces to more bite-size news items. I spoke to Abrams, a radio vet who joined Tribune in March from the former XM Satellite Radio, following an appearance on a panel at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money conference, as its first chief innovation officer. 

—Redesigning the stages of grief: Abrams said that opposition to the redesign was overblown, and insisted that the feelings of fear and anger have pretty much dissipated. He described reaction to the process as passing through three levels—instead of the Kübler-Ross model of five stages of grief, which go from denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. In this case, Abrams said, “It started with a lot of fear—‘We can’t do this’—to acceptance—‘Well, I guess we’re going to do this’—to excitement. But we’re continuing to fine tune it. I think you’re going to see that in six months, these relaunched papers will be considered better than ever.”

—Superbrands: One of the other initiatives Tribune is considering widening is a plan to bring its TV, radio and newspaper content together on the web. The company has been mixing staffers from its various media properties in Hartford, south Florida and Chicago, with the web acting as a central hub to showcase those efforts. “We’ve created a breaking news bureau that takes resources from Tribune radio, the free youth-oriented daily Red Eye and all our other properties. That’s going to be really big for us. We’re creating ‘breaking news’ brands in each of the different markets we operate in. The working title of the project is called ‘Superbrands.’”

—Penalizing the Luddites: While a major component of the newspaper redesign was to push more readers to the web, Abrams also believes the website can be used to make the print version more attractive. “We’re importing more from the web into the paper. I was in one market and was looking at their website, which featured a crime map, detailing where the most activity was happening. I thought this was great and asked if it was in the paper as well. ‘No, that’s just a web thing,’ they told me. It seemed like we were penalizing the Luddites who weren’t using the web. So while you can’t import everything back to the paper, we’re looking at what’s important and what fits.”

—Downturns make change easy: “Unfortunately, the difficult economy will drive the kind of change we need. It makes it more urgent. Newspapers should have started this long ago, but they were printing money for so many years. The thinking was, ‘Why fix it if it ain’t broken?’ You saw that in radio too, where audiences weren’t satisfied and weren’t as engaged as they were. But no one wanted t touch anything. But now, there’s no excuse not to change.”

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