New CNNI: Unfashionable & Innovative

In today’s Guardian, CNNI’s Chris Cramer explains the new on-air design:

“News has got too noisy, he says. And when the shouting gets too loud, nothing can be heard. So, henceforth on CNN, ‘the audience will still get exactly what they need from us but it’ll be cleaner, smarter. Everybody’s doing breaking news in red now. Well, guess what? Time to do it in a different, more attractive way – in yellow.’ Even the ticker has gone – to be replaced by what he is calling a ‘flipper,’ an information bar that calmly displays a whole sentence at a time, rather than imitating the excitability of Frank Bough’s teleprinter on Grandstand 30 years ago.

Cramer, a former BBC executive who first came to prominence when he was one of the hostages in the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, has been at CNN for 10 years, and is now involved in the running of five of its channels — in English, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and German. He admits that the new look is an unfashionable move. ‘I like to be unfashionable and we like to be innovative. But everything you want as an audience will still be there.'”