On the loose after disagreements about direction and staff cutbacks

ABC News InterActive executive producer David Bohrman, one of the industry’s highest-profile advocates for computer-controlled videodisc applications in education, has left the ABC News unit. His position may remain vacant.

Bohrman is a familiar face to those who’ve tracked interactive multimedia. As front man for ABC News’ intrapreneurial venture, he’s debated the pros and cons of interactive education around the globe, and he’s produced InterActive’s award-winning videodiscs on topics ranging from war in the Middle East to the company’s health series, which included a powerful disc about AIDS “starring” former U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop.

Not a happy situation. Though still under contract to ABC, Bohrman no longer reports to the New York-based office. ABC News InterActive president and producer Bill Lord wouldn’t talk about the details of Bohrman’s departure, though it’s obvious the parting of the ways was not mutually cheery.

“It’s not nice for us or for him,” says Lord, who first hired Bohrman 10 years ago to work on ABC’s Nightline news program. “It’s tragic that he’s leaving now that we’re making it.”

What? No software? Bohrman himself is slightly less circumspect. “There have been several months of significant differences between me and Bill over the unit, its direction and individual decisions, and it just wasn’t working any longer,: says Bohrman. One example, he says, is the three-disc series on the powers of the U.S. government–which is being shipped without the rich HyperCard-based driver that made InterActive’s products a powerful classroom tool for teachers.

” ‘Powers’ is a great product as it is, but it’s nowhere near as great or as deep as it could be,” he says. “We’ve been forging some of this new territory and creating new combinations of technologies and content. For the ‘Powers’ series, it’s a step backward.”

Production-side cutbacks. Bohrman says he also took exception to the “significant cutbacks” in staffing at the unit, primarily in the production side. Lord acknowledges that the company is “concentrating on marketing right now,” and he says it will continue to develop new titles at a slower pace than in 1991. “We feel comfortable with three titles a year.”

Though Bohrman is still technically an employee, the pity for ABC is that he doesn’t see much point in sticking around. He’s kept an active role in ABC’s news division–he was senior producer of ABC’s Persian Gulf war coverage and has continued to serve as a news producer, acting as senior producer of Nightline, World News Tonight and special news events such as floor coverage of political conventions. In fact, his coverage of the 1988 presidential conventions led to InterActive’s first disc, “The ‘88 Vote.”

Creating the inevitable. Bohrman says he wants to stay connected to the technology he helped popularize. “We accidentally stumbled into the unique position of having done some of these products and got a sense of where they might lead,” he says. “I want to help invent some of this future, help create some of these things that are inevitable and that we know are coming.”

News of Bohrman’s departure came just two weeks before InterActive announced a collaborative agreement with IBM to develop DOS-based software versions, using the newest version of IBM’s LinkWay hypertext software. Software front ends to the products are being developed by a third party, Media Design, an IBM business partner. Prototypes for six IBM-based InterActive titles were demonstrated at the National Educational Computing Conference in Phoenix last month.

- Denise Caruso