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.
