Tough on the Old Ticker?

"If more people are said to be moving to the World Wide Web for news, they always have to come up with something different to bring them back to their networks," said Sterne. "And the argument that they are crowding the screen may not be a good one. If they are trying to reach the upper-middle class, more of them have large-screen TVs. Think about a 29-inch screen and how much bigger it is than a 15-inch one. Giving up screen real estate is less of an issue than it used to be."

And perhaps even older viewers will eventually get used to the more crowded TV news real estate, learning over time to love the crawl.

"When we first encounter a new stimulus, like the crawl at the bottom of our TV screen, it takes us a while to determine what it is worth our time to attend to," said Kathleen Micken, associate professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.

"We have to engage in some perceptual sorting and categorizing to deal with the information overload. But once we accomplish that, we are once again comfortable with the format." Thus, she said, just as sports fans have grown used to split-screen replays and twirling mini-scoreboards at various corners of the screen, so will news junkies eventually think the crawl as an essential part of the viewing experience.

That will suit Fox's current queen of the crawl, Huang, just fine. "I love it," she said, itching to get her earphones back on to hear a feed for another Taliban-smashing news conference. "My friends read the crawl. Even my 60-year-old aunt. We went to dinner the other night, and she found out I was the Fox crawl writer. She said, 'You're the one who does that? Oh, I love that.'

"It's the thing, now," Huang said. "And I think it's here to stay."