网络时代传统媒体办经典英语美文

网络时代传统媒体办经典英语美文网络时代传统媒体办经典英语美文 TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE TUNING OUT OF THE NEWS The traditional news media in the US are in a state of turmoil Some of the biggest newspaper chains first Knight Ridder and now Tribune Company have put themselves up for sale Network news broadcasters are slashing their budgets the latest and most savage example being the cuts heralded by NBC Universal two weeks ago No wonder there is a siege mentality in newsrooms around the land Investors seem to be concluding that this is an industry with no future As is often the case though the mood swing has gone too far It is true that revenue growth is stagnating as readers and viewers spend more time with digital media and advertising is spread across a wider range of media outlets Even among an older audience readership is falling 10 years ago 70 per cent of Americans aged 65 or more were regular newspaper readers whereas the figure today is 58 per cent But these are still very profitable businesses The US newspaper industry boasts daily sales of 55m copies profit margins well into double digits and strong cash flows There are indications that the long term decline in readership may have stabilised in recent years and most people use the inter as a supplement rather than a substitute for newsprint So the big question is not whether the traditional news media will continue to exist in the foreseeable future Most of them clearly will But what kind of service will they provide to the public as they adapt their business model and with it their editorial content to a much more petitive environment With a few exceptions the big newspaper publishers in past decades operated in metropolitan or regional markets and were not austomed to head on petition Back in the early 1980s the three work news broadcasters shared a bined audience of around 60m for their nightly shows more than twice the current figure and provided a shared experience for American families a nightly national seance in the words of one contemporary This was a profitable world in which it was possible to run enormous editorial budgets with large numbers of foreign correspondents for even quite modest metropolitan dailies Most newspapers were privately owned free from the pressures of the stock exchange Owners were driven as much by civic pride and political influence as by the bottom line Competition is changing all that The television works have closed down most of their expensive foreign bureaus and have bee subsidiaries of much bigger businesses that are driven in good measure by the need for quarterly earnings progress and an unsentimental view of the news business The result is that viewers have a lot greater chance of learning about the latest health fad than about what is going on in Putin s Russia There are plenty of willing buyers for newspapers But most new owners will want to maximise their returns rather than take a broader view of their public role Here is the worry It is true that the new digital media have made available an extraordinary cornucopia of information and ideas for those people who want to look for it But what about those people who are not willing or not capable of making the effort A few decades ago you could hardly avoid exposure to the work news or the daily paper Today you can find a myriad of other forms of entertainment There is already evidence that Americans with relatively modest educational attainments are simply tuning out of the news altogether A quarter of all Americans with a high school education or less take in no news of any kind online or otherwise on a typical day In an effort to catch their attention news publishers are being more partisan and more strident The Iraq war has not been a triumph for judicious journalism The early stages were presented as a cross between July 4 and Halloween with flags fluttering martial music and no unpleasant images of mayhem and death to disturb the viewer Some senior reporters were promised by their unwillingness to challenge the White House line In today s petitive environment what mercial interest would a news publisher hav