THE NEWS CHANNEL CRAWL
When I was in college, there was something called the "State Street Crawl," which is what many students did on the bar-laden street in downtown Santa Barbara for their 21st birthday. But as it turns out, the "crawl" also refers to that news ticker that so many TV stations are running at the bottom of their screens lately. There is a story in the Washington Post that basically says crawls are a bad idea, but likely here to stay anyway. So let me make a plea - make them relevant. I can handle the tickers just fine on CNBC, but they drive me batty when CNN uses them. The difference, I think, is that CNBC rarely uses the ticker to compete with what their talking heads are saying. And the info comes in extremely small bites, unlike the annoying ellipses that CNN cheats with, trying to use three screens to complete one thought. CNBC uses stock symbols, the price, arrows pointing up or down, and colors indicating positive or negative. You only pay attention to the stock symbols you know and you easily screen out the rest. CNN bombards you with crap - like celebrity birthdays under their top story, text that dumbs down and repeats what their anchor is saying at the same moment, and pithy headlines that eat up precious character counts. And oh man, those ads for in-house crap must stop. My advice, TV people, is to cut way back on what you're putting up there and make it specifically complementary to what is happening on your main screen. The exception would be when your main screen is in feature mode - I think our brains go on "low" when you switch to fashion and fuzzy animals, so go ahead and give us a hard news ticker for those few minutes. But you need to remember that part of your job as an information provider is to sort through the news, not just spew it out in unreadable blobs.
- posted by Amy @ 10/22/2001 11:44:00 AM