Tough on the Old Ticker?

NEW YORK —  Lillian Huang stares intently at one of the several TVs at her desk. Through the earphones tight to her head comes an audio feed of a military news conference. A military man in camouflage is talking about Kabul and Kandahar and the Tora Bora caves.

It is Huang’s job to take the kernel from the colonel and get it crawling up there on the screen as quickly as possible. “This is not a job for a novice,” said Huang, who spent 10 years at ABC News before recently moving to the Fox News Channel. “It’s quick judgments. It’s a great job, right in the thick of the news.”

Huang is the daytime crawl-meister at the Fox News Channel, one of the gatekeepers for viewers who want their TV news quick and pithy. Since Sept. 11, the purveyors of national cable news--CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel among them--have been running a crawl, what amounts to an extra headline news service inching across the bottom of the TV screen.

It is not an insignificant amount of information the networks are squeezing in. Although each network has a slightly different visual style for its crawl, all try to have about 60 to 80 items in any one eight- to 12-minute cycle.

The crawl is not an ingenious new invention. Crawls have appeared for decades during programming of all types, usually only during emergencies like storms and disasters. In fact, they have been primarily local, indicating weather alerts, school closings and the like.

But since they started soon after the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were hit by hijacked jetliners, cable news networks have not turned them off.

The first non-terror, non-war information to be dropped into Fox’s crawl was the official announcement on Sept. 25 that basketball great Michael Jordan would return to play. In the weeks since, the crawls have become an often eclectic, sometimes inane mix of visual news bites, typically with minor happenings squeezed in between updates on major global events. Whether the crawls are here to stay, though, is up for debate among experts.

“I believe the informational crawls--and the goofy concept of giving stories titles similar to motion picture titles--will begin to disappear as the networks begin getting negative feedback from viewers through their own research or from media consultants,” said Joseph Angotti, a former NBC News vice president and now a professor of journalism at Northwestern University.

Angotti is no fan of the crawl, saying that he has never seen research that viewers want or need the crawls. Though people have told him the use of the Internet may have changed that, Angotti said, “Just because a Web site has multiple blocks of information spread across a screen does not mean a similar concept can or should be translated to a television screen.”

But Kerry Laguna, a psychology professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, has studied memory over the adult life span and said that the crawl may indeed be with us for a long time because younger viewers--possibly influenced by computer games and the Internet--can take in more on the screen than cranky oldsters.

“This ability to attend to multiple stimuli gets worse with age,” said Laguna. “We know older adults have more trouble dividing attention and suppressing irrelevant information. Young adults, partly because they have faster information processing and perhaps also because they are more accustomed to constant stimulation, seem to handle this better.”

Certainly Huang, who was an editor at ABCNews.com before her move, and her supervisor at Fox News Channel, assignment manager David Rhodes, are young people used to processing a lot on a TV screen. Small TVs on their desks are often split into four screens for their network’s feed and that of three rivals.

Most of the crawl content calls fall to Huang, though Rhodes monitors everything to make sure there is the right balance of information. Sometimes Rhodes opts for a screen that is split into 16 squares, each one having some station or internal Fox feed on it. A Walter Cronkite-era viewer would be understandably myopic in his or her view of the new multiplex TV landscape.

“It becomes a way to tell the whole story,” said Rhodes, himself squinting a bit to see the crawl in the Fox part of the 16-square feed. “When I started working here [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes said, ‘Always have something on while something is going on.’ Well, something is going on all the time now, so we have to keep the viewer informed.”

Though crawls quickly took over newscast screens after the terrorists’ attacks, CNBC already was using two ticker-type crawls: one for New York Stock Exchange prices and the other, below it, for Nasdaq stocks. The channel’s new news crawl is a little thinner and appears below the Nasdaq ticker. CNBC’s sister network, MSNBC, has a crawl with, as on CNBC, the multicolored NBC peacock symbol separating items.

Although the other networks have short headlines all the time in their crawls, the Fox News Channel’s crawl sometimes has items as long as two sentences. “We try to be concise,” said Huang, the Fox crawl producer, who says she has learned to excise articles “the” and “a” from her writing and is happy “Bush” is such a short presidential name. “But sometimes we feel it’s important to tell a little bit more than just a headline.”

CNN has two types of crawls; use depends on the time of day. During most of the day, the network runs a crawl with items separated by a red CNN logo. But in the morning, the crawl flows out of a bigger CNN logo on the lower right part of the screen, essentially cutting the crawl to only two-thirds of the screen.

“We kept that bigger logo in the morning because it has the time,” said Sue Bunda, the senior vice president of CNN. “We see a value to the viewer to have the clock there in the morning, so we’ve kept it and shortened the crawl.”

Bunda said there was talk at CNN about putting a crawl on that network’s screen before Sept. 11. “We were looking for ways to give more information to our consumers, the viewers, and the crawl seemed to be a likely candidate even then. Of course, planning went out the window when we started it Sept. 11,” she said. “We’ve gotten some negative feedback, but mostly it’s been positive. So even if the war winds down, I think we plan to continue it.”

Fox News Channel’s Rhodes, too, said there has been no discussion at his shop about discontinuing the crawl. Spokespersons for both MSNBC and CNBC said those networks are not cutting it out soon either. Though there is no indication yet when the crawls will disappear from TV screens, there is little dispute why they are now everywhere in cable news.

“In television news, ‘competitive’ is synonymous with ‘imitative,’” said Michael Cremedas, a media professor at Syracuse University. “If it seems to work for one network or station, all the others will do the same for ‘competitive’ reasons.”

Cremedas said he finds it curious that the networks would want to undermine their big-ticket attraction--the anchor reading the news or dramatic video footage--with a headline running underneath about something else. But Jonathan Sterne, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh, said the crawl is just another way to sell the product, which is TV news for stations like CNN and MSNBC.

“If more people are said to be moving to the World Wide Web for news, they always have to come up with something different to bring them back to their networks,” said Sterne. “And the argument that they are crowding the screen may not be a good one. If they are trying to reach the upper-middle class, more of them have large-screen TVs. Think about a 29-inch screen and how much bigger it is than a 15-inch one. Giving up screen real estate is less of an issue than it used to be.”

And perhaps even older viewers will eventually get used to the more crowded TV news real estate, learning over time to love the crawl.

“When we first encounter a new stimulus, like the crawl at the bottom of our TV screen, it takes us a while to determine what it is worth our time to attend to,” said Kathleen Micken, associate professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

“We have to engage in some perceptual sorting and categorizing to deal with the information overload. But once we accomplish that, we are once again comfortable with the format.” Thus, she said, just as sports fans have grown used to split-screen replays and twirling mini-scoreboards at various corners of the screen, so will news junkies eventually think the crawl as an essential part of the viewing experience.

That will suit Fox’s current queen of the crawl, Huang, just fine. “I love it,” she said, itching to get her earphones back on to hear a feed for another Taliban-smashing news conference. “My friends read the crawl. Even my 60-year-old aunt. We went to dinner the other night, and she found out I was the Fox crawl writer. She said, ‘You’re the one who does that? Oh, I love that.’

“It’s the thing, now,” Huang said. “And I think it’s here to stay.”