Why do so many people love to hate Lee Abrams?

Tribune Co.'s jive-talking chief innovation officer* has been a focal point for much of the dissent roiling the company in the months since Sam Zell took it over and started remaking or selling off its newspapers. At the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money conference this morning, I asked him why he thinks he and his stream-of-consciousness musings attract such vitriol. His response:

I think I'm the one that speaks out the most and brings up things that a lot of people don't want to hear -- a lot of the sacred things that I think a lot of people know but are afraid to speak up about. Part of my job is to bring up those things and bring discussion. You know, I send out those memos, and they're called "Think Pieces." It's not like orders from Chicago. It's just things to think about. I may be completely wrong but maybe not. So it comes with the turf of rethinking and reexamining everything. You bring up some real touchy topics that some people are offended by.

Have the prickly reactions caused him to reconsider his approach?

No, if anything, to go further. Because it has brought up a lot of what I call "newspaper secrets" -- things people are afraid to talk about but were thinking about -- and put them on the table so we can discuss them. I was in South Florida doing the redesign, and somebody raised their hand and said, "You know, I read our paper every day, and a lot of the stories are kind of boring. I hope I don't offend anybody." Then the publisher got up and said, "Really? Who agrees with that?" And the entire room, 150 people, all said, "Yeah, we have a lot of boring stories." And even the guy who wrote the story that person was referring to said, "Yeah, I wrote that story and I thought it was boring." It just gets people talking about things that are verboten, and that's important -- to get the dialog going.

Fittingly enough, Abrams -- clad in jeans and a horizontal-striped sweater of the sort Kurt Cobain favored -- was at the conference to take part in a discussion titled "Agents of Change: Can They Turn Old Media into Profitable Media?" Some highlights from the discussion:

-Abrams:

We need to go through the exercise of completely rethinking everything the newspaper does, not only as far as staffing and all that, but the actual content itself. So we went through that exercise, and really just tried to blow up all the clichés, all the assumptions, all the sacred things about newspapers and just reinvent them for 2008, respecting the history of it but just sort of a brutal look at what a newspaper in our different markets should feel like and look like and smell like....Bottom line, though, with traditional newspapers, is just aggressive, without prejudice rethinking of everything, very painful, creating a lot of problems but part of changing the culture is being competitive today in an area that hasn't changed, really, in years and years.

-Robert Thomson, The Wall Street Journal's managing editor:

You have to make a distinction between the sacred and the sanctimonious. The sacred is obviously integrity, accuracy...Part of the problem is, particularly in the U.S. but in other parts of the world as well, you had a journalistic culture which was very self-indulgent, self-reverential and self-referential. It wasn't referring to the readers' interests, but more to journalistic self-devotion.

-Abrams said Tribune has been holding "boot camps" to "liberate everybody from everything they ever learned" about newspapers, modeled on similar sessions he organized at XM. "Some people didn't get it, and they're gone. They were just really adamant about, 'No, I don't want to change or evolve.' So we had to find the people that did and put them in a room and just liberate their thinking.'"

-Abrams:

There was a big myth that you could not have these [newsroom] cuts that were going through and still produce a quality newspaper, and that's just nonsense....We've been through some pretty substantial cuts, and there were people who thought, "No, it's going to be horrible, you just can't do it, it's going to be dumbed down." And no, it just had to be rethought. It's just as intelligent and engaging as ever, just with fewer people.

-Abrams said he was opposed to the idea of a government bailout or rescue plan for the newspaper industry similar to the one created for banking:

I think it's a terrible idea. What would happen is newspapers would then focus on this ultra-elite point-five-percent and create these papers that are just unreachable to a mass audience. I think newspapers have to figure it out on their own. The ones that are smart and do it intelligently will prevail, but I think for government to come in and force this intellectual thing would be terrible. It'd almost be like in 1950, with rock-n-roll coming, all the sudden the government comes in to support classical music.

-Abrams on his boss, Sam Zell: "Sam's a brilliant guy. He sees that these radio, internet, all these other properties have tremendous potential, they've been horribly mismanaged, and have to evolve and get in sync with what's going on today. He's going to properly manage it and get it in sync. I think he's looking at a home run here."

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Correction: The original version of this item stated Abrams' position as chief information officer. He is chief innovation officer.