diff --git a/scrapy/core/engine.py b/scrapy/core/engine.py
index 35163641f..38c3c9526 100644
--- a/scrapy/core/engine.py
+++ b/scrapy/core/engine.py
@@ -194,7 +194,7 @@ class ExecutionEngine(object):
                 errmsg = str(_failure)
                 level = log.ERROR
             if errmsg:
-                log.msg("Crawling <%s>: %s" % (request.url, errmsg), \
+                log.msg("Error downloading <%s>: %s" % (request.url, errmsg), \
                     level=level, spider=spider)
             return Failure(IgnoreRequest(str(exc)))