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| 谁是报纸的杀手？
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| 时间：2006/08/31 出处：光明观察 |
吴万伟译自《经济学家》杂志
最有用的媒体形式正在消失，虽然让人关注，但没有必要惊慌。
作家阿瑟•米勒（Arthur Miller）1961年的时候说“我觉得，好的报纸就是国人之间的对话。”十年后，《华盛顿邮报》的两名记者写了一系列的报道文章最终把美国总统尼克松拉下台，使得印刷媒体的地位达到顶峰。在最风光的时候，报纸监督政府和公司的行为，通常设定新闻议题，其他媒体只有跟随的份儿。但是在如今信息泛滥的世界，报纸成了濒危物种。向读者出售文字，向广告商出售读者这个确保报纸的社会地位的业务正在分崩离析中。
在所有媒体中，报纸是因特网的最大受害者。报纸的销量在美国，西欧，拉美，澳大利亚，新西兰几十年来一直下滑。（别的地方，销量在上升）但是在过去几年，网络加速了报纸下滑的趋势。在《消失的报纸》（The Vanishing Newspaper）中，据菲利浦•迈尔（Philip Meyer）的预测，2043年第一季度将成为美国报纸的最后一位读者把最后一张报纸扔进垃圾堆的时刻。这种推断本来可能产生来自英国报业巨头比弗布鲁克（Beaverbrook）或者美国报业巨头赫斯特（Hearst）的抗议的，但是就连最玩世不恭的新闻大亨都不能否认越来越多的年轻人根本不看报纸，而是主要从网上了解新闻。15岁到24岁的英国人说他们开始使用网络后，看报纸的时间减少了30%。
到扔掉分离舱的时刻了吗，库伯爵士（Lord Copper）？
广告随着读者离开了报纸。这个浪潮几乎是肯定无疑的，主要因为网络媒体诱惑性强，能够将买卖双方撮合在一起，向广告商证明他们的钱花得值。尤其是分类广告已经迅速转移到网络上了。我们这个时代的报业大亨默多克（Rupert Murdoch）曾经把它们描述为报业流淌金子的河水,但是他去年说“有一天这条河要干涸。”在瑞士和荷兰报纸一半的分类广告业务已经被网络抢走。
现在报纸还没有开始大规模的倒闭关门，但倒闭只是时间问题。在接下来的几十年里，发达国家中一半的普通报纸都要关门。报业领域的工作在消失。根据美国报业协会的说法，报业从业人员数量在1990年到2004年下降了18%。上市的报业公司的股票急剧下跌让投资者大为光火。2005年，拥有多家美国日报的奈特里德（Knight Ridder）公司的股东要求公司卖掉报纸，结束了114年的历史。今年，一家投资公司摩根•士丹利（Morgan Stanley）攻击报界的代表《纽约时报》公司,因为其股票价格在4年中跌了几乎一半。
经过多年无视现实的蹉跎后，报纸终于行动了。为了减少开支，他们减少了新闻采访的费用。许多报纸也试图通过把新闻报道关注国际事物和政治转向与人们日常生活有关的事情，向娱乐，时尚倾斜来吸引年轻读者。他们也在尝试开展网上或者网下的新的业务。他们投资免费的日报，这些报纸不会用光他们可怜的编辑资源来揭露政治腐败和公司造假。但是到目前为止，这些活动不大可能挽救多少报纸。即使能够挽救报纸，也预示着报纸作为立法，行政，司法之外的第四权（Fourth Estate）公共角色的丧失。
逃脱被杀死的命运
将来，随着报纸的消失和改变，政治家们是否要不受惩罚地闯入对手的办公室，公司流氓在践踏公众利益的时候要肆无忌惮地欢呼呢？新闻学院和智囊库（尤其是美国的），在担心第四权缺失对政治经济的负面影响。一个慈善研究机构纽约卡耐基公司（Carnegie Corporation of New York）最近对报纸的研究报告质问“今天的新闻机构完成了给予民众全面信息的任务了吗？”我们知道公众获得全面信息是民主赖以存在的基础。
谁也不应该对曾经伟大的报纸的死亡感到幸灾乐祸。但是报纸的衰落并不像有些人担心的那样对社会造成巨大的危害。不要忘了，民主制度已经经受了1950年代电视的出现造成的报纸销量大幅度下滑的局面。民主经受考验是因为读者避开报纸、报纸避开在更保守的时代被认为是严肃新闻的东西。民主同样能经受即将到来的报纸的衰落，部分因为常常能够给社会带来最大好处的少数敢于揭弊的大报根本不用担心生存问题，只要它们的主管结合实际情况尽职尽责。像纽约时报和华尔街杂志等应该能够提高新闻报道的价格来弥补广告业务流向网络造成的收入下降的损失，特别是它们的读者遍及世界各地。
像许多行业一样，是那些处于中间地位的报纸---既没有高的文化修养，也没有娱乐性的大众口味---是最容易被淘汰的。报纸的作用决不仅仅是调查滥权，传播消息，还在于监督政府，在公众舆论的法庭中审问政府的作为。在这方面，网络其实扩大了这个舆论法庭。任何寻找信息的人从来没有像现在这样便利。人们不再需要相信少数几个全国性的大报，或者相信当地的报纸上的信息。专门的新闻网站如（Google News）搜集了世界各地的新闻来源。英国《卫报》的网站在美国的读者是在英国本土的一半。
另外，公民记者和博客的新生力量跃跃欲试要监督政治人物。网络已经将专业编辑和记者的封闭圈子打开，任何人只要有键盘和网络连接就可以做新闻。有些公司已经被业余爱好者的帖子追赶，或者来自戴尔的手提电脑操作者，或者来自睡在沙发上的有线电视维修员。每位博客可能都有偏见或者不负责任的言辞，但是作为整体，博客为寻找真相的人提供了大量思考的材料。当然，网络会迎合不加思考的读者，但是报纸也是如此呀。
严肃新闻报道－－与评论相对---纯粹的新闻工作的结果已经公认为受到限制的。多数博客就是在自己的椅子上操作的。不像报纸的头版头条，公民记者（citizen journalists）倾向于专注于本地事件，不过它仍然在初期阶段。新的在线模式将会蓬勃发展，如果报纸撤退的话。一个非营利性团体（NewAssignment.Net）计划结合业余记者和专业记者的工作以便出产网上新闻调查报告。很快，一免费分类广告网站Craigslist的创办人纽马克（Craig Newmark）给该项目提供了一万美元现金。该网站尽一切可能来破坏报纸的广告收入。卡耐基说将来一些高质量的新闻报道也会得到非营利性团体的支持。其实已经有些被广泛称颂的大报依靠这个方法维持生存，包括《卫报》（the Guardian）《基督教科学箴言报》（the Christian Science Monitor）《美国国家公共广播》（National Public Radio）等。一批严肃报纸的精英都有网络版，全世界各地都可以阅读，独立的新闻报道得到慈善团体，成千上万的热心博客和消息灵通的公民记者的支持，完全有迹象显示阿瑟•米勒的全国性对话会比以前声音更大。
译自：“Who killed the newspaper？”
http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7830218
The future of newspapers
Who killed the newspaper?
Aug 24th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
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