“Without trying to sound facetious or pretentious,” Jesse Zanger says, “I don’t consider it an art form.”
Well, that’s debatable. After all, it takes some ingenuity to craft a sentence like this: “Use The Force: Two Die Hard Fans Start Waiting On Line In Seattle For Star Wars Episode 2, Even Though The Picture Isn’t Slated For Release Until May.” News crawls have become a fixture on cable news channels, and, increasingly, network telecasts, since Sept. 11, as channels became eager to give audiences as much news as possible about the war on terrorism. Zanger, 31, is an editor for the Fox News Channel in New York who doubles as one of the network’s several crawl writers.
David Rhodes, assignment manager for Fox News, notes that “viewers want to be informed. It’s why they’ve tuned in to us. And this is giving them more information than they were getting previously.” Although Rhodes is slightly bemused about the attention crawls have generated, he knows the reasons are clear.
“I don’t want to say we’ve made some sort of pop cultural phenomenon,” he says. “We started doing it because this was such a different kind of story, and it’s not anything that certainly in our short history since 1996 we had confronted before. So we were trying to find new ways to present that.
“And I think that, yes, there’s been a lot of attention given to the news crawl, but I think there’s probably just been a lot of attention given to all kinds of ways that we’re trying to cover this conflict.”
Crawls, in fact, are a defining (some say overwhelming) feature at Fox competitor CNN’s revamped Headline News. With some stories, you can barely see the anchors for the crawls in the new Headline News format.
“We’re all doing it because it’s an effective approach to getting more information out to the viewer,” says Susan Bunda, senior vice president, CNN/U.S.
“It was something we had already had in the works, and were planning to debut it. And it was very clear to us from the events of Sept. 11 that the viewers just wanted as much information as we could give them. We found it an effective way to give more information.”
All the networks also went with crawls shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, expanding a format that had been used by such business TV channels as CNBC for years.
In the process, creating the crawls developed its own mystique and techniques, something like the classic tabloid headlines (N.Y. Post: “Headless body in topless bar”) that came to be regarded as almost as noteworthy as the stories they trumpeted.
Yearns for touch of panache
“I like it when it can have a little panache,” Fox News Channel editor Zanger says of crawls. “You can’t really dress up when `Three U.S. Servicemen Get Killed.’ That’s not the place for panache, that’s the place to say three U.S. servicemen got killed. That said, you might do something like `Harry Potter Works His Magic With Movie Audiences Again,’ or something like that.”
Zanger, who before Fox News was an editor with local all-news television outlet New York One, is planted on the “war desk,” where several editors and others monitor news on the war against terrorism.
Zanger, who went to Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and interned at the public television news series “The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour,” handles the morning-early afternoon shift Sundays through Thursdays. He monitors news stories from Fox News reporters and producers, wire stories, other networks and a variety of other sources, and then converts them into digestible news bites to scrawl at the bottom of the screen.
“My job is to try to sort of keep an eye on the whole pie, as it were,” says Zanger, who has been with Fox News since June, 2000.
And it is a big pie. If you’ve noticed, a lot of the crawls have information about the war on terrorism, news about anything related to the Sept. 11 attacks, and how terrorism continues to affect America.
“Here’s what’s going on through my mind when I’m working on the crawl,” Zanger adds. “I want to get this up now. That’s what is going on through my mind. News is breaking. The crawl is an amazing opportunity to put news out there right away.”
Don’t forget `Harry Potter’
But the crawls also relate news that has nothing to do with terrorism. After all, we need our fix of “Harry Potter” news, too.
“I think if you’ve read the crawl, you’re aware that the crawl doesn’t read like the rest of the English language,” Zanger says. “There are things that we try to steer clear of [conventional punctuation, for example], and there are various techniques that we do employ. And also on a pragmatic level, there are also standard abbreviations that we try and come up with,” such as “AMB” for ambassador and “FRM” for former.
Zanger follows a few other rules, such as trying to avoid using the word “that,” (“Sometimes you absolutely need it, but oftentimes you don’t”) and following a basic writing mantra: “Keep it short, keep it simple, keep it tight, and make sure it’s accurate.”
The shorter the better, considering these things are supposed to come in quick bites. And because they come so quickly and in such tight bursts, one gets the sense a viewer could easily get hooked on just the crawls and not the images that are the real reason why he or she is tuning in in the first place.
“It’s not supposed to be hypnotic,” Zanger insists, “but it is supposed to move the information along in a relevant way, in a way that makes sense. So that if you do tune in, you’ll get a story.”
Zanger says that, on average, between 50 or 60 items may flow across a viewer’s screen on Fox News over the course of 10-minute intervals. Most are related to the war on terrorism, and many of those stories are broken up into two or three items that relate to that single story. Depending on the amount of stories, crawls may repeat every 15 minutes or so until it’s no longer considered news.
“We’re trying to give as much of the story as we can, but also understanding the limits of the story-telling ability of the crawl,” Zanger says. “People are not tuning into the crawl to read a novel or even a magazine article or a newspaper article. They want headlines and they want information, so we try and give them as much information as we can without stepping beyond the logical opportunity the crawl presents.”
Zanger says he doesn’t have a favorite news crawl that he has written. “There have been so many, it would be really hard to pick one,” he says. “I haven’t had anything as good as `Headless Body In Topless Bar.'”
But that’s not to say he doesn’t have one he wouldn’t mind writing.
“I can tell you what I think my favorite crawl will be: `Justice Brought To Osama Bin Laden,’ or something like that, will be a very, very satisfying crawl to write.”
