A special report on the news industry: Bulletins from the future／轉載自經濟學人中文網

　　The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory , social, diverse and partisan —as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media , says Tom Standage
網路顛覆了新聞行業，使它變得更具參與性，社交性，多樣性及偏向性——就像大眾傳媒顛覆了早先的新聞業一樣。
——Tom Standage

　　EVEN IF YOU are not a news junkie , you will have noticed that your daily news has undergone a transformation. Television newscasts now include amateur videos, taken from video-sharing websites such as YouTube, covering events like the Arab spring or the Japanese tsunami. Such videos, with their shaky cameras and people’s unguarded reactions, have much greater immediacy  than professional footage. Messages posted on Twitter, the microblogging service, have been woven  into coverage of these events and many others. “You have these really intimate man-in-the-street accounts, and you can craft a narrative around them,” says Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter. A computer consultant in Pakistan unwittingly  described the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in a series of tweets. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, too, were reported on Twitter in real time by people who were there.
即使你不是新聞狂，也應該會注意到每天的新聞報導已經歷了一次轉變。電視新聞節目如今會採用來自YouTube等視頻分享網站上的業餘視頻，來報導如阿拉伯民主革命或日本海嘯這樣的大新聞。諸如此類的視頻片斷，通過晃動的鏡頭捕捉到了人們不經修飾的一面，相比專業剪輯而言及時性要強太多了。人們還將發佈在微博網站Twitter上的消息編織成一篇篇時事報導。“當你擁有了這些真正鮮活的實況報導後，就可以稍加敘述並整理成文。”Twitter的共同創始人Jack Dorsey是這樣說的。比如一個巴基斯坦的電腦顧問就在不經意間通過一系列的Twitter微博更新描述了美軍突襲本.拉登藏身處的經過。還有2008年孟買恐怖襲擊也是由現場民眾通過Twitter實況報導的。

　　The past year has also seen the rise to fame of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes leaked documents supplied to it anonymously. WikiLeaks and its media partners have published detailed records of the Afghan and Iraq wars, hundreds of classified American diplomatic cables and records from the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. “We believe that true information does good,” says Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder. “Our goal is not just to have people reading documents, but to achieve political reforms through the release of information.”
在過去一年裡，我們還看到WikiLeaks的大名日漸響亮，這是一個公開匿名提供的內部流出檔的組織。WikiLeaks和它的媒體合作夥伴已經公佈了阿富汗及伊拉克戰爭的細節檔案，上百個機密美國外交視頻，還有關塔那摩監獄的部分記錄。“我們相信真相總是有益的，” WikiLeaks創始人朱利安.阿桑奇說：“我們的目標不只是讓民眾獲悉檔內容，更是希望借由資訊披露來實現政治改革。”

　　In January this year Al Jazeera , a news organisation based in Qatar, published its own cache  of leaked documents, known as the Palestine Papers, which lifted the lid  on more than a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And by broadcasting amateur videos of the Tunisian uprising to its millions of satellite viewers across the Arab world, the channel played an active role in spreading the protests across the region. Among television news organisations it has led the way in integrating social media (such as tweets, Facebook posts and amateur online video) into its operations in order to engage with its increasingly wired  audience. “The way we operate has changed because the landscape  has changed dramatically,” says Moeed Ahmad, the firm’s head of new media.
今年一月，位於卡塔爾的新聞群組織“半島電視臺”也公佈了他們收集的洩密文件，即“巴勒斯坦報告”，由此揭開了歷時十餘年的巴以談判中的種種內幕。而且通過向阿拉伯世界的百萬衛星電視觀眾播送有關突尼斯革命的自拍視頻，半島電視臺在助推該地區抗議活動的過程中也扮演了積極的角色。通過整合自身新聞業務及社交媒體（如Twitter, Facebook上帖子和線上視頻片斷）來和日趨網路化的觀眾緊密聯繫在一起，這方面“半島”在所有電視臺中一馬當先。 “半島”新媒體部主管Moeed Ahmad 說：“我們轉變運作模式是因為所處的大環境已發生了巨大變化。”

　　Clearly something dramatic has happened to the news business. That something is, of course, the internet, which has disrupted this industry just as it has disrupted so many others. By undermining  advertising revenue, making news reports a commodity and blurring the boundaries between previously distinct news organisations, the internet has upended  newspapers’ traditional business model. But as well as demolishing old ways of doing things, it has also made new ones possible. As patterns  of news consumption shift, much experimentation is under way. The internet may have hurt some newspapers financially, but it has stimulated innovation in journalism.
顯而易見，新聞業正在發生著戲劇性的變化。當然，由網路引發的這些變化，在衝擊新聞業之前早已影響了許多其他行業。通過削弱廣告收入，商品化新聞報導及模糊過去涇渭分明的新聞機構間的界線，網路徹底顛覆了報刊的傳統商業模式。不過在推倒舊模式的同時，新模式也被創造。隨著新聞消費業版圖的變化，許多試驗正在被嘗試。雖然網路可能會在財務上對某些報紙造成傷害，但它激發了新聞領域的創新性。

Reporters all
全民記者總動員

　　For consumers, the internet has made the news a far more participatory and social experience. Non-journalists are acting as sources for a growing number of news organisations, either by volunteering information directly or by posting comments, pictures or video that can be picked up and republished. Journalists initially saw this as a threat but are coming to appreciate its benefits, though not without much heart-searching . Some organisations have enlisted  volunteers to gather or sift  data, creating new kinds of “crowdsourced” journalism. Readers can also share stories with their friends, and the most popular stories cause a flood of traffic as recommendations ripple across social networks. Referrals  from social networks are now the fastest-growing source of traffic for many news websites. Readers are being woven into the increasingly complex news ecosystem as sources, participants and distributors. “They don’t just consume news, they share it, develop it, add to it—it’s a very dynamic relationship with news,” says Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, a news website in the vanguard  of integrating news with social media.
對消費者而言，網路已將新聞塑造成了一個參與性及社交性大大提升的活動。非新聞工作者正成為越來越多新聞機構的消息來源，他們或志願投稿，或發佈可採編和轉載的評論、圖片或視頻。記者們起初將之視為一種威脅，但正漸漸感受到它的益處，當然也伴隨著對自己職業角色的深刻思考。有些機構還徵召志願者收集、篩選資訊，創造出了一種新的“大眾源”新聞採編模式。讀者也可以和朋友們分享新聞故事，隨著推薦轉貼在社交網上的連鎖傳播，最流行的幾個報導會招來洪水般的流覽量。目前社交網上的新聞連結才是許多新聞網站增速最快的訪問源。讀者們正被編織進一個日漸複雜的新聞生態系統，在那裡他們即是消息來源，又是參與者，也是傳播者。“他們不僅消化新聞，還會分享、跟進、充實那些資訊——這是一種充滿生命力的關聯方式。” Arianna Huffington這樣說，她是Huffington Post的共同創始人，這是一家在整合新聞及社交媒體方面走在前列的新聞網站。

　　As well as making Twitter, Facebook and Google part of the news ecosystem, the internet has also made possible entirely new kinds of specialist news organisations. It has allowed WikiLeaks, for example, to accept documents anonymously and publish them to a global audience, while floating in cyberspace above national jurisdictions, operated by a small, nomadic team. Other newcomers include a host of not-for-profit news organisations that rely on philanthropic funding and specialise in particular kinds of journalism. Many of these new outfits collaborate with traditional news organisations, taking advantage of their broad reach and trusted, established brands.
網路不僅使Twitter, Facebook 和 Google成為了新聞系統的一部分，也讓嶄新形式的專業新聞機構的誕生成為可能。比如，它允許WikiLeaks向全球觀眾公開從匿名管道獲取的文件，在袖珍、分散的團隊管理下跨越各國司法體制遨遊於網際空間。其他的新面孔還包括一大堆非贏利性新聞機構，他們依靠慈善基金並專注於特定領域的新聞報導。許多這樣的新生新聞群組織會同傳統新聞機構開展合作，以借用其覆蓋廣泛，倍受信任的金字招牌的品牌優勢。

　　All these new inhabitants of the news ecosystem have brought an unprecedented breadth and diversity of news and opinion to the business. This has cast new light on a long-running debate about the politics of journalism: when there are so many sources, does political objectivity become less important?
所有這些新聞世界裡的新居民，為這個行業帶來了前所未有的廣泛、多樣的新聞和見解。而這也為爭論已久的新聞工作的政治性提出了新的切入點：當我們有了那麼多的消息來源時，新聞報導的政治中立性是不是就不那麼重要了？

　　This special report will consider all these trends in turn, starting with a look at the state of the industry and the new business models that are emerging. It will argue that as news becomes more social, participatory, diverse and partisan, it is in many ways returning to the more chaotic, freewheeling and politically charged environment of the era before the emergence of mass media in the 19th century. And although the internet has proved hugely disruptive  to journalists, for consumers—who now have a wider choice than ever of news sources and ways of accessing them—it has proved an almost unqualified blessing.
本期特別報導將依次談及這些新趨勢，我們將從行業現狀及新型業務模式說起。有觀點認為隨著新聞業變得更具社交性、參與性、多樣性及偏向性，它在許多方面正退回19世紀大眾傳媒出現前的那種更加無序、隨意和政治化的新聞環境。另外，不同于記者們在網路面前所受到的巨大衝擊，網路對消費者而言無疑是一種饋贈——他們得到了比先前更廣闊的新聞來源及獲取途徑。

本文轉載自經濟學人中文網，原載網址http://www.ecocn.org/thread-51816-1-1.html。