We spent some time in this week going through the local coverage from Denver’s local TV newsrooms of last Sunday’s breaking news around the horrific attack on a crowd of protestors in Boulder, Colorado. As we went through the recordings of each station’s on-air broadcast signal from that afternoon, we were struck by the lack of on-screen breaking news “crawls” (aka “tickers” in some corners) over each network’s sports programming.

That got us to wondering: Do on-air crawls for breaking news alerts still matter in 2025?

When we mentioned it in some conversations this past Monday, one colleague asked an even more provocative question that sent us further down the proverbial “rabbit hole.” In the “multi-platform” world we are in now, is it time to rethink the whole emphasis local TV newsrooms put on having “Breaking News” coverage on their broadcast signals?

Given the multitude of ways consumers can get news information delivered to them, do they really want or even need any interruptions into their coverage of the Women’s US Open Golf tournament? Or the PGA Tour’s stop at The Memorial tournament? Perhaps the NCAA Women’s World Series? How about the drag racing finals from New England? Or even the made-for-TV spectacle that is the United Football League as it aired across two different networks?

Do we just assume that they get everything they need from devices other than the television set? Has streaming breaking news coverage sufficiently replaced the broadcast channel as a way to deliver breaking news?

We ask all this, because in reviewing of the recordings of these stations on the afternoon of Sunday, June 1st, in market number 17, we didn’t see a lot of information presented to the viewers of those TV programs about what was happening in Boulder. At least not before those station’s regular newscasts started at 5pm, Mountain Time.

The first on-screen news crawl we saw about the Boulder story was on KCNC, known locally as “CBS News Colorado.” Their news crawl went up at approximately 3:14pm (all times mentioned are local) and stayed up for about 17 minutes. It had first word of police investigating an attack in Boulder with several blocks evacuated. The crawl also pushed viewers who wanted to watch coverage on their “Live 24 hour stream” though no details on how to access said stream were included on the crawl. An updated crawl appeared at 3:39pm which added some more detail, including a briefing from Boulder Police coming up at 4pm. This crawl promised live coverage on streaming and added information about where to find the CBS News Colorado live stream. It would air well past the start of the police briefing, staying on with the “scheduled to start at 4pm language" until 4:17pm. The @CBSColorado account on X.com shows a first post of “Colorado police responding to attack at Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall” at 3:35pm.

There would be no further on-air updates offered by KCNC until 4:30pm when CBS began its “CBS Weekend News with Jericka Duncan." That newscast led with the Boulder Attack story as a voiceover followed by a short sound bite from the Boulder Police Chief’s press conference. CBS News Colorado at 5pm followed with extensive coverage from Boulder, including three live reporters on the scene. They deserve a special mention for thinking of having one of those reporters, Michael Abyeta, at a nearby Synagogue where he detailed that people were gathering under heightened security from law enforcement. It was detail that no other station had in their coverage. The hour-long newscast was dominated by the Boulder story, going the entire first block for nearly 11 minutes and then being updated three more times in the second half-hour at 5:30pm.

KDVR, Fox31 in Denver, put up a crawl at 3:36pm over the UFL football game that Fox was carrying. The crawl read: “Boulder Police: Several blocks of Boulder’s Pearl Street under evacuation order. Several people injured.” That was all of the detail offered, followed by noting that “Fox31 News-Streaming Anytime on Fox31+” That crawl ran about 15 minutes with no update, until the station did its first breaking news special report at 3:50pm. That made Fox31 the first station to interrupt regular programming with an anchor in-studio and a live reporter in Boulder.

Following a very solid five minutes of breaking news from the Fox31 anchor (whose name was never mentioned or supered) and reporter Shaul Turner in Boulder, viewers were promised more live coverage when the Boulder Police Chief would hold a press conference in the next hour. Viewers were returned to the UFL game in progress with the exact same previous crawl. That ran until 4:04pm when the station did return with another special report as the Boulder Police Chief began to speak. On X.Com, the station’s @KDVR account posted the headline “Boulder police respond to Pearl Street for reported attack” at 3:18pm.

KUSA, Denver’s “9News” ran its first crawl at approximately 3:37pm with a bit more detail on the situation, including evacuations in part of downtown Boulder. Then at 4pm it ran a brief crawl alerting viewers to the upcoming Police briefing which would be covered live on sister station KTVD-20 and streaming on 9News+. The station then produced a solid half-hour special report covering the Boulder Police Chief’s remarks and featured live coverage around the scene of the attack from three of its reporters on the ground in Boulder. Oddly, the station didn’t run any further crawls over the Women’s US Open golf that was still airing on KUSA’s over the air signal, so if a viewer missed the initial crawl, they wouldn’t know of the news coverage going on over on the second station and the livestream. Looking back at their timeline on X, the first post from @9News there was at 3:17pm.

Then there was KMGH, “Denver7” which was airing ABC’s coverage of the Women’s College World Series on this Sunday afternoon. If you were watching the event, you received zero notification of the news happening in Boulder. No cut-ins, no crawls—at least not about the news. The X.Com account shows a first post from Denver7’s @DenverChannel account at 3:24pm, stating “BREAKING: The Boulder Police department said that officers were responding to the Pearl Street Mall after a report of an attack with several victims. KMGH was the most active station posting updates on X, along with reposting posts from its reporters and anchors into the evening.

Back over on its broadcast television signal, the station began running a severe weather crawl for thunderstorms moving through the metro at approximately 4:41pm, shortly before the game ended. (Tennessee defeated UCLA, 5-4 in case you missed it.) Then in a strange moment in the end commercial break following the game, KMGH’s meteorologist Stacey Donaldson went on the air with a severe weather cut-in that ran a couple of minutes, which then dumped back into ABC, which was now amid the lead story in the weekend edition of World News. The network’s lead story was the Breaking News on the attack in Boulder. The severe weather crawl would stay up until the station started it’s local 5pm newscast at the top of the hour, which began with a single live reporter in Boulder and would move on to severe weather coverage in less than four minutes. The half-hour newscast would end a little later than its scheduled running time at 5:40pm to join a program called “Real Talk with Denver 7 and CPR News.” Unfortunately, the program, which appeared to be pre-recorded, would feature Colorado’s Governor and other interviews all talking about the upcoming move of The Sundance Film Festival to…Boulder, Colorado.

Let us run a disclaimer here that while we carefully watched the off-air recordings of the four main Denver stations carefully during the hours of 2pm to 6pm local time, we certainly could have missed something during the period. We went back and reviewed each station’s timeline on X.Com as of Wednesday, June 4th, so it is possible that some posts there may no longer be visible. And finally, we don’t have details on any push alerts each station may have sent out via their own mobile apps.

Which brings us back to where we started with this hypothesis: Maybe in the present day, running on-air crawls or even doing special reports on breaking news via a station’s air signal isn’t that important? Certainly, any local TV meteorologist who has gone on the air with breaking coverage of severe weather warnings can detail the abuse they have likely received from viewers whose “absolutely favorite show ever” has been interrupted for some critical emergency information. More and more these days, viewers will even be upset about a severe weather crawl airing (especially if it happens to cover the scoreboard graphic of a sporting event.)

And yes, we do understand that this story broke on a Sunday afternoon, when any local station is probably minimally staffed. But what happens in these moments is where reputations for coverage can be made–or lost. It was clear that each station moved to deploy multiple people to cover the developing story of what had happened in Boulder.

We just wonder what happens when at least some portion of the audience decides to turn on their televisions to see if their local station is covering the nearby breaking news that they are getting those alerts on their devices about?