CLUTTER OR CONTENT?
by Deborah Potter

It's hard to escape the impression that the look of television news changed forever on September 11, 2001. News tickers, once reserved for important breaking news or severe weather alerts, have since become permanent fixtures in local and cable newscasts around the country. But the change actually was well underway before September 11. As Chip Mahaney, executive producer at KDFW-TV in Dallas, told an audience at the 2002 RTNDA convention in Las Vegas, "August 6 was the day the revolution began."

August 6, you may recall, was the launch date for the "new" CNN Headline News, a television format that squeezed what had been primary news content--the anchors, reporters and video--into the upper left corner of the screen, leaving the rest for graphic information. Mary Lynn Ryan, now managing editor of CNN-USA, who oversaw the launch of the new look told the audience that Headline News viewers now get more information than they used to, which she calls "value added."

But Paul Traudt of the University of Nevada--Las Vegas said the Headline News format makes it harder for viewers to understand the content. "Viewers are comfortable with crowding," he said, "if the elements are all related to the same topic." But Headline News has "multiple, incongruent elements" like weather conditions, a stock ticker, sports scores and headlines unrelated to the main topic, and Traudt said "the result can be information overload."

That wasn't something the folks at CNN considered before launching the new format. "Believe it or not," said Mary Lynn Ryan, "no real audience research was done." Ryan said Headline News was trying to target a younger demographic, which she described as "time warriors." Teya Ryan [no relation], then general manager of Headline News, came up with designs based on a Bloomberg model and asked people in the target age group who worked at CNN what they would like to see on the screen. "It was word of mouth," Mary Lynn Ryan said, "and a gut feeling by Teya and her team."

Fox News Channel, on the other hand, tested three different graphic options with focus groups before it launched. According to Richard O'Brien, FNC vice president and creative director, the presentations were developed along the lines of salsa: mild, medium and spicy. "People overwhelmingly went for the middle more than the mild," O'Brien said in an interview. "Hot was too much, and with mild, they didn't feel as informed." FNC also tested the fact panels it puts on screen next to the anchor. "Everybody was afraid people would stop listening and start reading," he said. "We found you would listen, glance over, and still hear what the person was saying."

Lately, the ticker revolution has spread to local stations. But some stations have been on the bandwagon for a long time. At WKYT-TV in Lexington, KY, Jim Ogle says he began experimenting with tickers eight years ago, frustrated by the results of efforts to be hyperlocal in covering sports results. "If we got [the scores], we'd have to do three minutes of Chyron," he told the RTNDA audience. "It looked like teletext." The station created a sports ticker, and then found an advertiser willing to sponsor it. Now, WKYT has a weather ticker during the weather segment, giving the forecast for 55 cities in the viewing area. They also do hyperlocal news for small communities. "We could not create more time in the newscast," Ogle says, "and we could not put on more spots." The ticker became the only way to put more information and more sponsors on the air. "Our older viewers think I am the devil," Ogle said, pointing out that as a CBS station he tends to have an older audience. "But high school kids say it's cool."

Ryan agreed that there's a generational difference in how viewers react to the ticker. "The only way we measure success is in ratings," she said, "and our desirable demos [18-54] are up 103 percent."

Traudt, however, questioned whether those viewers are learning anything from watching Headline News. "If your goal is still to educate and inform," he said, "we need to look at what the human mind is capable of doing." His advice to Ryan: "Lose the ticker for everything but breaking news, and go with just one primary text box to match the narrative."

There's no evidence that anyone at Headline News is considering any such changes. But Ryan said, "I know the [anchor] box will not get smaller." Well, that's a relief.