TITLE:
News Crawls in Local TV News: Do They Help or Hinder Information Recall and Retention
AUTHORS:
Brittany L. Pavolik, Mark J. Piwinsky, Lacey A. Fulton
KEYWORDS:
News Crawls, Local TV News, Information Overload, Dual Coding
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.3 No.4,
December
31,
2015
ABSTRACT: News crawls have become a common element in local television newscasts. Used as a way to provide
more information and compete with content rich online news, the question is whether news
crawls help or hinder immediate recall and long-term retention of information. Using a quasi-experiment,
this study examines immediate recall and long-term retention for a local television
newscast. A control and two treatment groups, comprised of students at a public, mid-sized university
in the USA, saw one of three versions of the same newscast. The control group saw a newscast
with no crawls while the treatment groups saw a version with crawls that reinforced the onscreen
story or with crawls that were on different topics from the on-screen story. Considering information
overload and the dual-coding hypothesis, this study also examines the impact of the
textual element of the crawl as an aid or obstacle in information recall and retention. The study
lends support to the dual-coding hypothesis and suggests further research is needed on its impact
even when the on-screen story and textual crawl are not covering the same news item.