In a memo sent to Tribune staffers, Lee Abrams, Tribune's chief innovation officer, lists 15 ways to grow newspapers. Abrams' suggestions center around a principle goal: making newspapers more accessible, efficiently organized, and timely. Here are a couple noteworthy ideas:

Compartmentalize
    
Abrams says that newspapers need to organize news by subject and avoid scattering related stories across the paper. "The content is there," Abrams says, "But it's not consolidated."

Tone down the "NPR feel"

According to Abrams newspapers should be "intelligent...not intellectual; smart...but not elite." Newspapers are in the mainstream business, he says, and should be shooting for "Morning News Radio" - not National Public Radio.

Let designers do their work

The notion of barring designers from certain sections is absurd to Abrams, who claims that a story's look, not its headline, engages readers.

"They [designers] are the ones that will package the information into greater engagement...The right headline and an amazing look and you will get engagement into the content."

Keep it simple

"Newspapers have a habit of making things so hard to read, absorb, and engage in," Abrams writes. He says papers need to "break away from instincts" and "think like a 2008 consumer."

Abrams' emphasis on making newspapers eye-catching and palatable may make some traditionalists shudder. They fear he wants to "dumb down" newspapers, but Abrams insists this is not his intention.

"I mean make intelligent content easy to engage in. There's no law that says intelligent content must be difficult," he writes.

To his credit this is not Abram's first try at reforming media; he is the mastermind behind album-oriented rock, the format that rejuvenated FM radio programming. He thinks he can do for newspapers what he did for radio.

"I realize all of this isn't easy. It's a tough challenging and logistically complex business...but these are, in my opinion, a start," Abrams writes, "I think this is all attainable."

Click here to read Abrams' complete list of suggestions.

Source: Poynter Romenesko