Monday morning, when hundreds of thousands of bleary-eyed Chicagoland residents retrieved their newspaper from their front stoop, they were awakened to a bright and bold new Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune, the flagship of The Tribune Co. which also includes the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, WGN-TV & AM, and the Chicago Cubs baseball team (here’s hoping for the Series!), has been in a downward spiral in both advertising revenue and readership, with 100 editorial layoffs in recent months. The publisher hopes that the redesign positions the paper better in this new world of visual media.

The Tribune Co. has been working hard on retrofitting its properties for future success. Recently they rebranded the WGN-TV Superstation into WGN America. Behind most of these new creative effort is an old radio salt, Lee Abrams.

For the non-radio types, Abrams is nothing less than one of the people who ensured the success of FM radio. Lee Abrams designed the original Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format of the 1970’s and 80’s, and his Burkhart-Abrams consultant firm was the Tiffany of its day. In the past 10 years, Abrams has been behind the programming development of XM Satellite Radio.

In March, Abrams left XM for Tribune to serve as their Chief Innovation Officer. He has been behind relaunches for papers in nearly all of their markets, along with the TV and radio properties. Here’s what he said in a July internal memo about the newspaper business:

I really don’t buy into the newspapers are dead routine as long as we get in the game. There’s room for Internet, Cable, radio, AND newspapers…but we have to park denial at the door and do what we gotta do. Newspapers CAN be their own worst enemy by resisting change, not living on a 21st Century competitive level, or being unable to separate from the past. It’s a whole new world out there and survival and growth means creating a new playbook that gets you in sync with the 2008 picture—and fearlessly and intelligently making the moves you gotta make.

Once again, a radio guy taking the creativity that sprouts out of working in a one-dimensional medium and spreading it across the spectrum.