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Tuesday, September 11, 2018

9/11: The Debut Of the Scrolling News Ticker


For cable news outlets, 9/11 was the day they introduced the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of their screens. Now a ubiquitous part of the news-watching experience, the news ticker was largely unused before the 2001 attacks.

According to The Observer, prior to September 11, news tickers had mostly been used to alert viewers of emergency weather updates, sports scores, and stock market quotes, and were used intermittently at most.

That all changed the day of the attacks, when news networks suddenly found themselves scrambling to keep up with a disaster that was rapidly and simultaneously unfolding in New York City, Washington DC, and rural Pennsylvania.

At 10:49 a.m., 21 minutes after the collapse of the World Trade Center's North Tower, Fox News launched its scrolling news ticker at the bottom of its screen featuring the latest facts and headlines. CNN followed suit within 20 minutes, and MSNBC debuted its own news ticker at 2 p.m., according to the Observer.

For viewers, desperate for information and answers, the news ticker was a welcome innovation.

Americans remained glued to their TVs for weeks following the attacks, and networks kept pace by keeping the ticker on their screens. Unlike past emergencies, this time the news never stopped scrolling. Networks continued to employ it in the days, weeks, and months after the attacks, until viewers could hardly remember a time before it existed, according to Business Insider.

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