[推荐][The Economist ]Compose Yourself - 新闻自己写

Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better

新闻业也变得更加互动，好戏还在后面

"WE CHANGED South Korean politics and the media market, but I’m too shy to say that,” says Oh Yeon Ho before he can catch his own irony. But Mr Oh, the founder and boss of Ohmy News, a sort of online newspaper, has earned the right to boast, because Ohmy is the world’s most successful example to date of “citizen journalism” in action.

     “我们改变了韩国政治和媒体市场，但是我们很低调，从不声张。”吴连镐骄傲地说道。但是吴先生，这位“Ohmy新闻”的创始人兼老板有资格自豪，因为Ohmy，这个有点类似在线报纸的网站是当今世界上把“公民新闻”成功实践的典范。

  Ohmy’s website currently gets an average of 700,000 visitors and 2m page views a day, which puts it in the same league as a large newspaper. But Ohmy has no reporters on its staff at all. Instead, it relies on amateurs—“citizens”, as Mr Oh prefers to call them—to contribute the articles, which are then edited by Mr Oh, a former magazine journalist, and a few colleagues. Mr Oh likes to think of Ohmy as a “playground” for South Korean hobbyists, where “adults” set certain rules and thus give the site credibility. The articles tend to be good, because “in South Korea we have good people power,” says Mr Oh. “They are highly educated and eager to change society.” Ohmy also has built-in feedback and rating systems so that the best articles rise to the top.

     Ohmy网站目前每天平均访问者为70万，页面浏览量为200万。这使它能与其他大报相抗衡。但是Ohmy没有记者，取而代之的是业余爱好者——吴先生叫他们“公民”。这些业余爱好者贡献文章，随后吴先生和少数几个同事修改这些文章。吴先生曾经是一家杂志的记者，他喜欢把Ohmy描述成一个为韩国网络爱好者提供的运动场。在这里，“成年人”制定规矩，为网站增加了可信度。文章的质量不错，因为“在韩国，我们的人民力量很大，”欧先生说，“他们文化程度高并渴望改变社会。”Ohmy有内建的反馈和评级系统，这样可以使最好的文章得到最高的评价。

  One of Ohmy’s biggest innovations is economic. The site has a “tipjar” system that invites readers to reward good work with small donations. All they have to do is click a little tip-jar button to have their mobile-phone or credit-card account debited. One particularly good article produced the equivalent of $30,000 in just five days. Ohmy’s own economics also appear to be working well. Even though Mr Oh originally intended the company to be not-for-profit—“my aim was not to earn money but to create a new kind of journalism,” he says—he turned it into a for-profit firm in 2003. He will not divulge how much profit he makes, but the advertising and syndication revenues (from other internet sites that run Ohmy’s articles) seem to keep him going nicely.

     Ohmy最大的创新之一是经济效益。这个网站有一个“小费罐”系统，邀请读者给与优秀文章的作者小额资金的赞助。读者只需点击一个 “小费罐”按钮，这样他们就可以通过手机或是信用卡支付。一篇特别好的文章可以在5天内得到相当于3万美元的资金。Ohmy网自己的经济效益也相当可观。虽然吴先生原本打算把公司建成非盈利的组织——他说：“我的目的不是赚钱而是建立一种新的新闻模式。”但是他在2003年把这个网站转变成一家追求利益的公司。他没有透露赚了多少钱，但是从广告和联合收入（来自其他需要Ohmy文章的网站）上看，他的收入相当不错。

  Ohmy’s success has already had wide ramifications in South Korea’s media industry. Although it has not killed off any South Korean newspapers or broadcasters, it has forced all of them to adjust by becoming more like Ohmy. Several newspaper sites, for instance, now have feedback and conversation panes at the bottom of online articles and are trying to interact more with readers. Mr Oh, who left his career in the mainstream media because he was sick of what he saw as their conservative bias, also reckons that Ohmy has helped to improve the balance. If the media scales used to be tilted 80% in favour of conservatives, he thinks, Ohmy has reduced that to 60%; he wants to make it 50%.

      Ohmy的成功已经在韩国的媒体业产生了广泛的连锁效应。虽然它并没有消灭任何一家韩国报纸或广播电台，但它迫使这些公司做出调整，结果是它们越来越像Ohmy。比如，几家报纸网站目前在它们的在线文章下面新增了反馈与对话版块，以便与读者产生更多的互动。吴先生离开主流媒体是因为他厌恶了那些保守的偏见，并且认为Ohmy能帮助保持保守与激进之间的平衡。如果主流媒体中80%的文章支持保守派，Ohmy可以把它减少到60%；而吴先生想减少到50%。

What works, and what doesn’t

什么有用，什么没用

  Does South Korea, a country of early adopters in many ways, foreshadow the future everywhere? “The reality is that you can’t point to many successes; Ohmy News is the only one,” says Dan Gillmor, a journalist who quit his job at the San Jose Mercury News, a newspaper widely read in Silicon Valley, in order to found Grassroots Media, an experiment in American citizen journalism. After a year or so of looking in vain for a good business model, Mr Gillmor has put the idea on ice.

     韩国是个在很多方面都喜欢尝鲜的国家，它是否预示了未来的趋势呢？丹•格尔默说：“现实是你不能指望会有很多人成功；Ohmy新闻是唯一成功的一个。”他曾经在《圣•求斯水银新闻报》当记者，这份报纸在硅谷有广泛的读者。后来他辞掉工作，创建了“草根媒体”，一个关于美国公民新闻的试验。进行了一年左右，因为找不到好的商业模式，格尔默先生冰封了这个想法。

  But others are much more optimistic. Last year Al Gore, a former American vice-president, and Joel Hyatt, his friend and business partner, set up Current TV, a cable-television channel that encourages its viewers to contribute their own video stories. And they do. “Viewer-created content”—or “VC2”,as Current TV calls it—now accounts for 30% of the channel’s airtime, and rising. Mr Hyatt, the chief executive, thinks it will eventually be half or more. To help people get started, Current TV has extensive online tutorials on storytelling techniques, CAMera equipment and so forth. And to organise the content that comes in, its website allows users to vote on the quality of each video clip. It is, in many ways, a pure meritocracy.

      但是有人比他更加乐观。去年，前美国副总统阿尔•郭和他的朋友、商业伙伴约珥•海厄特创立了“趋势电视”，一家有线电视台，鼓励观众把他们自己拍摄的故事送到电视台来播出。还确实观众这样做了。观众制作的内容（“趋势电视”叫做VC2）现在站到电视台播放时间的30%，而且这个比例还在增大。公司总裁海厄特先生认为以后会占到一半或者更多。为了帮助人们制作，“趋势电视”建立了详细的在线教程，教人们讲故事的技巧，摄影装备以及诸如此类的东西。该网站允许用户对每一份视频的质量进行投票，以此来管理收到的录像作品。从许多方面来看，这都是纯粹的实力主义。

  When Current TV was launched, the traditional cable channels “didn’t get it” and sneered, Mr Hyatt recalls with glee. “What people didn’t understand is that there are tens of thousands of people out there who can create something great for a few minutes.” For instance, a story by an American traveller who found himself in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s pull-out was probably the best piece of video reporting on the subject that ran on television at the time. During Hurricane Katrina, some residents of New Orleans made excellent contributions by taking cameras onto their home-made boats and making videos of their own neighbourhoods.

      “趋势电视”建立的时候，传统的有线电视台都搞不懂，还嘲笑它。海厄特先生现在回忆起来还面带笑容：“人们搞不懂，居然会有成百上千的人可以自己制作几分钟的短片，而且效果还很不错。”比如，在以色列撤出加沙地带的时候，一个美国旅行者拍到的故事很可能是当时电视上关于这个事件最好的录像。在卡特琳娜飓风肆虐的时候，新奥尔良的一些居民奉献了他们在自制的小船上用摄像机拍下的邻居的录像，这些录像非常好。

  Yahoo! provides an even bigger example of the cheerful mixing of professional and amateur content (as opposed to Ohmy’s insistence on the purely amateur). For instance, a lot of the articles, photos, audio and video on Yahoo! News come from corporate partners such as Associated Press or CNN. A tiny bit comes from Yahoo! itself (specifically, from Kevin Sites, a oneman camera team who travels to exotic and dangerous war zones around the world). But more and more content comes from citizens—Yahoo!’s users—says Scott Moore, who runs Yahoo!’s news and finance pages. Indeed, Yahoo! explicitly allows users not only to contribute content but also to take part in its filtering and placement, he says. These new collaborative processes even have a name—“folksonomies”—to distinguish them from the top-down “taxonomies” that human editors traditionally create.

      雅虎公司甚至提供了更好的例子——专业人士和业余爱好者共同制作的电视内容（与Ohmy完全由业余爱好者投稿形成对照）。比如，雅虎新闻网上的很多文章、照片、音频和视频来自兄弟公司如美联社和CNN。一小部分来自雅虎自身（确切地说，来自凯文网，这个网站由一个只有一个人的摄影队创建，这个摄影队前往世界各地危险的战场）。负责管理雅虎新闻和财经页面的斯科特•摩尔说，越来越多的内容来自公民，即雅虎用户。确实，雅虎明确允许用户投稿，还允许他们参加内容的筛选和发布。这些新的合作过程甚至还有个名字——“大众分类”，用以区分组织管理严密的“分类法”，即人工编辑们建立的传统方法。

  For example, during the terrorist attacks on London’s Underground last year, quite a few people in the wrecked trains took haunting photos with their mobile phones. They then wirelessly uploaded these to Flickr, a photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo! Other users then “tagged” these photos by attaching labels such as “London Underground” or “bombings” to them so that they could be easily found. The same or other users then spontaneously rated the pictures. This in turn brought the best pictures to the attention of Yahoo!’s human editors, who displayed them prominently alongside “professional” content across Yahoo!’s news sites. All of this happened within minutes.

     例如，去年伦敦地铁遭受恐怖袭击的时候，很多失事列车上的乘客用他们的手机拍下了令人难忘的照片。接着他们无线传输到雅虎旗下的照片分享网站Flickr。其他用户把这些照片贴上诸如“伦敦地铁”、“爆炸”之类的标签，这样他们就能很容易地找到它们。同时这些用户或其他用户给这些照片评级。这样雅虎的人工编辑就能看到评价最高的照片，接着他们把这些照片同那些“专业”的内容一起放到雅虎的新闻网站上。所有这一切只需几分钟。

  The citizen journalism brought out by events such as the London bombings, Katrina, Asia’s tsunami and other recent events has sent a new joke into the blogosphere: that Andy Warhol’s proverbial “15 minutes of fame” have now become “15 megs” (megabytes) of fame for everybody on earth. That may be true. But the area of citizen journalism that is currently growing fastest, according to Mr Moore, is the least glamorous end: the so-called “hyper-local” coverage of, say, high-school sports or petty neighbourhood crime, which is usually too small even for local newspapers. This is one reason, says Mr Moore, why “in almost every market in the US we’re already the number two provider of local news, after the leading local newspaper, and that’s without even putting a lot of focus into it.”

    伦敦地铁爆炸、卡特琳娜飓风、印度洋海啸等时事把公民新闻推上了前台。而这又给博客界增添了新的笑料：安迪•沃赫尔众所周知的“出名15分钟”现在对于地球上的每一个人来说变成了出名“15兆”。这可能成为事实，但是据摩尔先生说，当前公民新闻增长最快的领域是最不吸引人的所谓“超本土”领域，比如高中体育赛事或者小的社区犯罪，这些对于当地报纸来说太微不足道。摩尔说，正因为这样，我们已经成为本地新闻的第二大供应者，仅次于当地最大的新闻报纸，而且不费吹灰之力就办到了。

  For society as a whole, all this new talent—from bloggers, who are “journal-ists” in the classic sense, to citizen journalists—should amount to something overwhelmingly positive. “The more journalism the better; I don’t care who does it,” says Dan Gillmor. That is not, however, how professional journalists, ostensibly speaking on behalf of the public, usually choose to see it. Their mood is gloomy.

     所有这些新的人才，包括记日志的博客和公民记者对于社会整体而言，其影响应该是极其正面的。丹•摩尔说：“我不在乎是谁写的，反正新闻越多越好。”但是职业记者并不这么看，虽然他们表面上代表公众发言。他们心情很糟。

Hard pressed

高压

  “Among our newspapers as they now stand, little more can be said in their favour than that they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish.” Thus Joseph Epstein, a serial author, writing in the monthly magazine Commentary. Another author, Philip Meyer, makes his point in the title of his 2004 book, “The Vanishing Newspaper”. The last reader will recycle the last newspaper in April 2040, Mr Meyer estimates. If so, one of the most visible products of Gutenberg’s movable type would expire eight years short of the printing press’s 600th anniversary.

      连载作家约瑟夫•爱波斯坦在月刊《评论》中这样写道：“现在的报纸除了不用电池，可以拍苍蝇，包鱼，再没有其他用处了。”而作家菲利普•迈耶在他2004年的著作标题中也表明了他的观点——《消失的报纸》。迈耶先生估计到2040年4月，最后一位读者将把最后一份报纸扔进垃圾筒。如果真是这样的话，古腾堡的活字印刷制造的最广为人知的产品将在印刷机发明600周年还差8年时从地球上消失。

  By common consent, the newspaper industry is in a perfect storm. In America, circulation has been gradually but steadily falling since 1990, according to Editor & Publisher, a trade journal. The trend in other countries is much the same. Most young people nowadays do not read a daily newspaper at all. To make matters worse (and to devalue the argument that society must preserve newspapers as “trusted” sources of news), the industry has been through a string of scandals, the most ignominious being the New York Times’s fiasco with Jayson Blair, one of its reporters who simply made up his stories. According to The State of the News Media, an annual American research project, the industry has laid off more than 3,500 newsroom professionals since 2000, about 7% of the total. In hard-hit Philadelphia, for instance, the number of reporters covering the metropolitan area is down to 220, half the 1980 figure.

      众所周知，报纸业正经历着一场完美风暴。在美国，据商业期刊《编辑与出版》统计，报纸的发行量自1990年以来逐渐稳定下降。在其他国家，趋势也大体相同。今天的大部分年轻人根本不读报纸。更糟的是（报纸作为可信新闻来源的争论越来越没有价值），报纸业经历了一连串丑闻。最丢脸的是纽约时报的记者詹森•布莱尔捏造了他的新闻。根据美国每年的研究项目“新闻媒体状况”，报纸业从2000年以来裁员3500人，占总员工的7%左右。比如在费城，大都市地区的记者数量降至220，比1980年减少了一半。

  Trends in advertising—and particularly classifieds, an inherently user-generated medium—are even bleaker. Whenever Craigslist.org, a do-it-yourself online bulletin board, enters a new city, local papers hear that proverbial sucking sound. EBay, the world’s biggest auction site (which also owns a stake in Craigslist), already works like a global trading place. Last November, Google launched “Google Base”, a free service that allows users to upload anything—including classifieds—free of charge. These are consummate trading and advertising machines “for which journalism would be a ridiculous distraction”, says Mr Gillmor, who now works as an industry researcher. “That’s hard to compete with if your main cost centre is journalism.”

    广告业——特别是由用户制作的分类广告——的前景更加暗淡。每当Craigslist.org（一个在线DIY电子公告牌）进入一个新的城市，当地的报纸就会摒住呼吸。Ebay，世界最大的拍卖网站（也是Craigslist的股东）已经成为全球贸易集散地。去年十一月，Google推出了“Google Base”，一项免费服务，允许用户上传任何东西，包括分类广告。这些都是完美的交易机器和广告机器，“而新闻将分散人们的注意力。”格尔默先生这样说，他现在是行业研究员，“如果新闻是你的主业，那么你将很难和别人竞争。”

  Two bitter ironies serve to deepen the gloom. The first is that advertisers have been even slower to adjust than the newspapers themselves. After an admittedly delayed start, the papers are now getting better at helping their readers to move to their online offerings, so their customers as a whole are not actually defecting. But advertisers do not value the two media in the same way. Lauren Rich Fine, a financial analyst of newspapers, estimates that for every advertising dollar that a newspaper gets for a print reader, it receives only 20-30 cents for his online equivalent. Even though online advertising is growing by 30% or more a year, this is from a tiny base. Pip Coburn, an investment strategist, estimates that even newspapers such as the New York Times, which are widely read online, get only 5-10% of their revenues from the web.

      两个辛辣的讽刺加深了这种暗淡。第一个是广告客户比新闻报纸调整得更慢。在公认慢人一拍之后，报纸出版商开始把读者向他们的在线内容转移，这样他们的客户总的来说没有实质的背叛。但是广告客户并不认为这两种媒体有相同的价值。新闻报纸金融分析师劳伦•里奇•芬估计报纸每收入1美元，其相应的在线内容只收入20到30美分。虽然在线广告业务年增长超过30%，但其基数非常小。投资战略家皮蓬•考本估计即使像纽约时报这样被广泛在线阅读的报纸，其网络广告收入也只占总收入的5%到10%。

  The second irony—a common one for sunset industries—is that decline, financially speaking, is very pleasant. Printing presses, the main capital outlay for newspapers, last for decades and are depreciating peacefully with little need for new cash. As newspapers get rid of the more atavistic elements in their print editions—such as the pages of (inherently out-of-date) share prices—they also save on ink and paper. Thus, despite all the frightening circulation numbers, Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, estimates that the average profit margin for America’s 12 biggest newspaper publishers in 2004 was 21%, more than double the average of the Fortune 500 companies. Some people are still making money, in other words, and are willing to invest. Last month McClatchy, a big American publisher, bought Knight Ridder, the country’s second-biggest stable of newspapers, for $4.5 billion.

      第二个讽刺——对于夕阳产业很常见的一个——是从财政上来说下降是很令人高兴的。印刷机是报纸出版商主要的资金支出项目，它能用几十年，慢慢变旧而不需投入新的资金。当报纸出版商在纸质版本中摆脱了诸如广告页面等隔代遗传的因素，他们也节约了墨水和纸张。因此，虽然发行量令人担忧，投资银行高曼•塞克斯还是预计2004年美国12大报纸出版商的平均利润率为21%，这一数字比财富500强公司的平均利润率高出两倍多。这说明仍然有人在赚钱，换句话说，仍然有人愿意投资。美国一家大的出版商麦卡锡上个月用45亿美元收购了美国第二大新闻报纸里德骑士。

Old media fight back

传统媒体的反抗

  But increasingly, newspaper barons, not content to preside over slow decline, want to embrace the revolution. One of them is Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, one of the largest newspaper publishers in the English-speaking world. Last year he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that “as an industry, many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably, complacent”. Young readers, Mr Murdoch said, “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” So what do newspapers need to do online to adjust? Their websites, Mr Murdoch said, “have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor any more. She goes online and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers.” Soon after this speech, Mr Murdoch bought MySpace, an online blogging and social-networking site wildly popular with young people.

      但是，新闻报纸巨头们越来越不甘心坐以待毙，他们想要拥抱革命。英语世界最大的新闻出版商之一新闻集团的主席鲁波特•默多克是其中之一。去年他对美国新闻报纸编辑社团说：“在这个行业，我们很多人都毫无原因地沾沾自喜”。他还说：“青年读者不想依靠一个像上帝一样高高在上的人物来告诉他们什么重要。把这个宗教比喻延伸一下，年轻人当然不想看像福音一样的新闻。”那么报纸要如何调整它的在线版本？默多克先生说：“要变成谈话的场所。数字化的国民不再写信给编辑。他们上网建立博客。我们要变成那些博客们的目的地。”在说完这番话之后，默多克先生买下了MySpace，一个在线博客和社交圈网站，很受年轻人欢迎。

  Rhetorically, Mr Murdoch hit all the right notes. Implementing this soaring vision, however, is difficult in practice. Exactly how does an august publication turn itself into a “place for conversation”, especially given that all sorts of lively conversations are already in progress in the blogosphere? Last year, the Los Angeles Times gave it a go. Michael Kinsley, its opinions-page editor at the time (as well as a former co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire” show and a founder of Slate, an online magazine) turned his page into a “wikitorial” in which readers could edit articles (more on wikis in the next article). This did not work at all. Vandals converged on the wiki and wrecked it, until the newspaper shut it down and parted with Mr Kinsley. The Washington Post, too, experimented with a blog open to outsiders, and also shut it down after a spate of vandalism.

      默多克先生说起话来头头是道。但要想实现这个高瞻远瞩的梦想，做起来还是很困难的。而且如何把一份威严的报纸变成“谈话的场所”，特别是在各种生动的谈话都已经出现在博客上的时候？去年《洛杉矶时报》尝试了一把。其观点页面的编辑迈克尔•金斯利（他曾是CNN“唇枪舌剑”节目的主持人，还是在线杂志“行为记录”的创建人）把他的网页变成了“维基”，读者可以在上面编辑文章。但这并没起到作用。文化艺术破坏者聚集在维基上并破坏了它，最后《洛杉矶时报》不得不关闭这个页面并辞退了金斯利。华盛顿邮报也试过建立一个向公众开放的博客，但最终也是因为汪达尔主义的破坏而被迫关闭。

  The worst conclusion that newspaper owners could draw from such setbacks is that interactivity does not work and should be avoided. “It’s like saying, ‘I hear there are assholes in New York, so I’m not going there’; yes, there are assholes, but you should still go there because we can figure out who the assholes are,” says Jeff Jarvis, a former journalist and newspaper consultant who blogs at Buzzmachine.com. He suggests joining the online conversation in ways that are appropriately circumspect.

      新闻报纸出版商商从这些挫折中得出的最坏的结论是互动性不起作用，应该避免。“这等于说，‘我听说在纽约有坏蛋，所以我不会去那里’；是的，那里是有坏蛋，但是你仍然要去因为我们知道谁是坏蛋。”杰夫•贾维斯说，他曾是记者和新闻报纸顾问，现在在Buzzmachine.com网站写博客。他建议以相当谨慎的方式加入网上谈话。

  The first step, says Mr Jarvis, is to tear down any walls around the website. Nowadays “it’s not content until it’s linked,” he says, and bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and subscriptions to be viewed. This has immediately obvious effects (see chart 2). The sites that bloggers link to most are the online New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, USA Today and the BBC. These are free or mostly free sites and thus, in effect, part of “the” conversation, because they are already part of a great many conversations.

      贾维斯先生说，第一步是拆掉网站周围的“墙”。现在“有链接才有内容”他说，博客们不会链接那些需要登入或者订阅的文章。这有明显的即时效应。博客们链接最多的网站是纽约时报、CNN、华盛顿邮报、雅虎新闻、今日美国以及BBC。这些都是免费的或几乎免费的，因为它们本身就有很多谈话，这使它们成为“谈话”的一部分。

  By the same logic, news sites should avoid the still surprisingly common internet sin called “link-rot”. This
refers to websites that publish an article under one web address (or URL, for “uniform resource locator”), but then change the URL when archiving the article. “If you break your links, you break your inventory,” says Jerry Michalski, the media consultant, “and nobody links to rotting links.”

    同样的逻辑，新闻网站应该避免“坏链”这一仍然十分常见的网络垃圾。“坏链”是指网站在同一网址下发布文章（或URL，即“统一资源定位”），但是在存档这些文章的时候又改变URL。“如果你切断链接，你就切断了外界与库存的通道，”媒体顾问杰瑞•迈克斯基说，“没人会链接坏链。”

  Free access and permanent links are two specific examples of a new “story-centric” approach that Jupiter Research, an internet consultancy, advises newspaper companies to adopt for their web editions. Instead of assuming that readers will start on the front page, editors should expect them to enter at any point, probably having started out from Google’s search page or a blog or an e-mail from a friend with a link. This makes a big difference. It means that every single page needs navigation aids to help readers along in their journey. For publishers, says Jupiter, it requires “deconstructing their websites—treating individual stories (and not the website) as their most important product.”

    免费接入和不变的链接是新的“以故事为中心”方法中两个具体的例子。互联网咨询顾问公司“朱庇特研究公司”建议新闻出版商在在线报纸中采用这种方法。编辑应该做好读者从任何一个链接点进入的准备，而不是假设他们从首页开始。读者可能从Google的搜索查询页面、博客或者一封朋友发的含有链接的电子邮件。这会造成很大不同。这意味着每个单独的网页都需要导航助理来帮助读者浏览网页。朱庇特说，出版商需要“解构他们的网站——把每一篇文章（而不是网站）当作他们最重要的产品。”

  The next step is to allow—indeed, encourage—reader participation on individual pages. This could start with a simple star-rating system of each article. Deeper engagement would include comment panes at the bottom of stories (like those below blog posts), or blog discussions between the journalists and invited guests. As with some group blogs today, contributors could be required to log in, either under their real name or a pseudonym. This leaves reputation trails and discourages vandalism. “Just as more blogs will look like newspapers, more newspapers will have blog-like aspects,” says Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future.

     下一步是允许，不，应该是鼓励读者参与到每一个单独的网页。可以从为每一篇文章建立星级评价系统开始。更进一步的参与包括在文章下面建立评论版块（像那些在博客帖子下面的一样），或是记者和受邀来宾在博客上的讨论。如今天的一些博客群一样，投稿者需要用真名或笔名登入。这会留下名誉记录，劝阻汪达尔主义。未来研究院的保罗•萨佛说：“正如更多的博客将越来越像报纸，更多的报纸会有博客的功能。”

  Admittedly, this kind of advice can sound like woolly new-age claptrap to newspaper publishers. They want to know whether there will still be a long-term business model for things like investigative reporting and fact-checking. Ironically, they are finding support among their internet rivals, who tend to be idealists. Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, says that “journalism needs to become a community service rather than a profit centre,” and is working on making this happen. As The State of the News Media puts it, “the worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of full-time, professional monitoring of powerful institutions.” That, after all, is what a free press in democracies is supposed to be for.

      诚然，这种建议对于新闻出版商来说像是刻意讨好。他们想知道是否有一种长远的商业模式来经营调查报告和事实确认。讽刺的是，他们正在从互联网对手那里寻求帮助，这些公司趋向于理想主义。Craigslist公司的克雷格•纽马克说：“新闻业需要成为一项社区服务而不是利益中心”他正在为此努力。正如“新闻媒体状况”所说的，“我们并不担心平民媒体的到来，我们担心的是对强大机构的专职监控的消失。”毕竟，那才是民主国家里应该有的出版自由。

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