Tough on the Old Ticker?

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.