news crawl

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.

On 9/11, the cable news networks added a news crawl at the bottom of the screen. In those days and weeks after 9/11, it was a very good thing to have, because it gave us updates throughout the day and made you think you were involved. But after a while they seemed like just more screen clutter, another sign that TV networks wanted to look like web sites, and another reason why so many people have ADD. Now it looks like one of the channels has gotten rid of the crawl.

CNN has not only changed their on-screen graphics and fonts, they've also gotten rid of the news crawl. There's still text at the bottom of the screen though. Instead of the crawl CNN now has changing info about the news story they are talking about, reactions from viewers, Twitter and Facebook comments from viewers, etc.

I think this is a good thing. I'm not sure what value having a bunch of comments from viewers at the bottom of the screen is, but I like that there isn't news coming at me from all over the place. It's rather retro. I bet some teenagers can't even remember a cable news channel before the crawl.

If you didn't notice (which is fine, people shouldn't obsess over things like this like we do), MSNBC debuted a new news crawl and new on-screen graphics this morning. So far, it's a thumbs down.

While CNN and FOX News have cleaner, squared off graphics, MSNBC has gone with funky, pointy boxes on the right hand side that show the time and the MSNBC logo, while the left hand side shows the stock report. It's great that they separated the time and stocks, so now both can be on the screen at the same time, but the way they've done the boxing, it looks odd (and the text on the screen sometimes overlaps the new graphics, which isn't good). The crawl is odd too, because it doesn't crawl across the entire screen, only half of it (the stocks block the rest of the screen), and since only so many words can stay on the screen at once, it takes several seconds to even figure out what the story is about (but maybe that's on purpose, to make you stick around longer).

The new MSNBC logo is good though. It keeps the colorful peacock but it's now a lot thinner. Too bad they didn't put good boxes and a better setup around it. And I think it's time to get rid of the "MS" part. Why not just make it NBC News Channel now?