Is this really CNN? Or are we trapped inside a pinball machine with Rick Sanchez? Rick diagrams the banking bailout bill with a telestrator, like a football play! Now we've got video of the ladies on The View bashing each other over Sarah Palin! Wait, a train crashed in Los Angeles while the engineer was texting his cyberbuddies! And PunditGirl is on the Twitter board, demanding that the No. 2 guy in the Treasury Department explain how many more banks are going to fail!

Welcome to the fastest hour in television news. Rick Sanchez, who two decades ago pioneered the if-it-bleeds-it-leads tabloid TV format at WSVN that spread from South Florida across the nation like a contagion, is doing it again.

His new CNN show, which airs from 3 to 4 p.m. weekdays, may be television's first true multimedia experience, slicing and dicing video clips, live interviews, and Internet chat boards into a dizzying sensory bombardment that could be the future of TV news -- or its death.

''It's fast, it's extremely fast, it's too fast for my taste,'' says Sam Roberts, a former CBS News producer who recently retired from his job teaching broadcast journalism at the University of Miami. ``But the news business has to move on, and this may be the way it needs to go.''

GAINING VIEWERS

There are signs that viewers think so. Since its ''soft'' (that is, with almost no promotion) launch a month ago, Sanchez's show has increased the time slot's audience by nearly 25 percent, to almost 900,000. Tens of thousands of his viewers have also signed up to swap messages and questions through the Twitter, Facebook and MySpace social-networking sites. The show is to a conventional newscast what an MTV video is to a movie, full of giddying cutaways -- as many as three dozen per hour -- at locomotive speed. Some segues are smooth (from a report on declining illegal immigration to an analysis of voting trends in border states) and some are breathtakingly random (from Kim Jong Il's reported stroke to a new Sarah Palin action figure). Either way, it's all punctuated with a steady stream of viewer comments and questions via the Internet.

''Rick has unleashed the power of Twitter,'' says Jon Klein, head of CNN's American operations, referring to the social-networking Internet site that instantly links its users for messages of 25 words or so -- and figures heavily in Sanchez's show.

``The speed of life has increased steadily for decades. We've gone from the network TV news cycle, delivering stories once a day at 6:30, to the cable news cycle, 24 hours a day, to the Internet news cycle, nearly instantaneous, to the blog news cycle, where it doesn't even have to be news, just whispers or rumor.

``Now we've reached Twitter, which is life beat-by-beat: I'm picking up the phone, I'm on the phone, I'm opening a Coke. That's the speed of Rick's show.''

Practically every television news operation has taken steps to engage its audience through the Internet, particularly in allowing so-called ''citizen journalists'' -- almost anybody with a camera and a computer -- to contribute videos and stories. The practice is fraught with risk -- CNN got a taste of that Friday, when a poster on one of its websites sent Apple stock prices plunging with a false report that CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack -- but it appears here to stay. And Sanchez's show is the most audacious yet in its embrace of it.

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