Abrams does the mea culpa

With his latest missive generating adverse reaction and more bad PR for Tribune, innovations chief Lee Abrams has sent out an apology. This is landing at the Tribune properties, with the subject line "my apologies."

I would like to take this opportunity to personally apologize to everyone who was offended by one of the videos in yesterday’s Think Piece. It was poor judgment on my part and I’m sorry.

At the initial creative meeting for our new morning program, we showed 13 videos—some of which we liked, and some of which we didn’t like—to help demonstrate the concept for the program. We used old Coronet films, as well as some motivational and social media videos. Included were a few videos from “The Onion,” which use satire to call out the silliness of some TV shows.

The video in bad taste was a parody of a cable-type reality show. It is not something that we would ever air on our TV stations—in fact quite the opposite—we show this as an example of what NOT to do.

But still, I understand that it was very inappropriate to distribute a link to the video to a wider audience, and I have asked our technology department to delete the email from our servers. Again, I’m sorry for offending anyone, and I promise to make sure that my future emails contain nothing like this video ever again.

Lee

Earlier today: Tribune execs go off-color again