经济学人下载:新闻产业的未来,重回咖啡屋时代

Going West
In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009, helped by particularly strong demand in places like India, where 110m papers are now sold daily. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries.

在世界大部分地区，大众传媒都在蓬勃发展。世界范围内的报纸销量从2005年到2009年增长了6％，特别是有巨大需求的印度地区，每天就有１亿１千万的销量。但在富裕国家读者人数却大幅下降。

Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving up newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and distributing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile-phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social-networking sites and shown on television newscasts. An amateur video taken during the Japanese earthquake has been watched 15m times on YouTube. “Crowdsourcing” projects bring readers and journalists together to sift through troves of documents, from the expense claims of British politicians to Sarah Palin’s e-mails. Social-networking sites help people find, discuss and share news with their friends.

过去十年整个西方世界中，人们逐渐放弃报纸和电视，而是通过其它的方式与时俱进。更引人着目的是更多的普通民众参与到新闻的收集、分享、筛选和讨论中。推特使人们可以随时随地将他们的所见所闻相互分享。各种各样的文件被无数在线用户上传。手机拍客们拍摄的阿拉伯暴乱以及美国龙卷风的视频和照片在社交网络中广泛传播并且为电视报道所引用。YouTube上一部摄于日本地震期间的相关视频被浏览一千五百万次。“众包”将读者与记者紧密联系在了一起，共同处理各种新闻文件，从英国政客的消费声明到Sarah Palin的邮件。社交网络为人们与好友之间寻找、讨论和分享新闻提供了平台。

And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important (some say too important) conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders, including Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez, publish updates directly via social networks; many countries now make raw data available through “open government” initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world: the Guardian, a British newspaper, now has more online readers abroad than at home. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites such as the Huffington Post, to rise to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practised by WikiLeaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets, like the BBC.

不仅仅是读者在向传统传媒发起挑战。包括谷歌、脸谱、Twitter在内的科技公司也逐渐成为新闻传播的重要渠道。包括奥巴马在内的许多名流和政要通过社交网络公布他们的实时动态。互联网打破了人们阅读报纸及收看电视频道的地域限制：the Grardian, 一份英国报纸，现在较其本土读者有更多的网上读者。从博客到类似Huffington Post的网站，互联网使更多人成为新闻的可能提供者，在很短时间内就获得大量关注。互联网也为新闻的发布提供了一种全新的可能，正如维基解密所做的那样，为揭密者提供匿名发布信息的平台。新闻媒体再也不会为少数传媒巨头或部分政府部门所控制，就像BBC。

We contort, you deride
In principle, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. A Texan who once had to rely on the Houston Chronicle to interpret the world can now collect information from myriad different sources. Authoritarian rulers everywhere have more to fear. So what, many will say, if journalists have less stable careers? All the same, two areas of concern stand out.

原则上来说，每个自由主义人士都应该为此庆祝。一个更具有参与性与社会性的新闻环境，一个更加集思广益、百家争鸣的新闻环境是值得庆祝的。德克萨斯人曾经必须依靠Houston Chronicle来与外界保持联系，但现在却可以通过无数的渠道得到他们想要的消息。专治统治者忧心忡忡。但也有很多人发问，这会不会对记者这个职业产生冲击呢？同样引起关注的还有两点。

The first worry is the loss of “accountability journalism”, which holds the powerful to account. Shrinking revenues have reduced the amount and quality of investigative and local political reporting in the print press.

首先就是担心负责任的媒体会越来越少，这些媒体会对他们报道的内容负责。经费的减少降低了调查研究和本地政治报道的数量和质量。