Back in December, I thought that CNN's new news flipper, which replaced the continuous news crawl at the bottom of the screen with a black and white text that "flips" to give us a new story, would be a great change for the network.

Now I'm not that sure.

The crawl was an annoying thing to have at the bottom of the screen, giving us 27 things we had to concentrate on while watching TV (TV channels won't be happy until they look exactly like web screens), but at least they gave us the full story. CNN's new flipper just gives us one line "teasers" which pretty much explain nothing. Right now on my screen the flipper includes lines like "Officials At Greek Prison Resign," "Airline Brings Back Free Drinks," and "Pennsylvania rocked by 'jailing kids for cash' scandal." Um, why did the Greek prison officials resign? Which airline is giving us free drinks? What the hell is "jailing kids for cash?"

You don't have to tell us the whole story, I'll watch the channel and get my news, but at least the old crawl gave us a little bit more meat and not just one-liners. This would be like this post saying just "CNN's new flipping news thing is even worse than the crawl" and then you click on it and there's no explanation at all. Gah.

MSNBC and FOX News still use the crawl. I don't think that news at the bottom of our TV screens is even needed, but if they do have to have something there, I think a crawl is better than a flipper.