Special Report
The newspaper industry
More media, less news
媒体多了，新闻少了
Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition
Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded
报纸公司在互联网上取得了进步，不过还是太畏缩，还是太谨慎，还是太高傲。
THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own. Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits.
挪威报业公司Schibsted的总部位于首都奥斯罗。对于去那里参观的人来说，第一件要做的事情就是去探访它那自1856年就开始使用的手工印刷机，这台机器现在看起来依然整洁光亮，让人觉得更像是一座雕刻品而不是能印报纸的机器。公司的创始人Christian Schibsted当初买下这台机器只是为了给别人印报纸的，可是当合同不再让他负责印刷的时候，他决定自己开一家报纸公司。尽管Schibsted公司依旧对自己这台古董式的印刷机引以为豪，但事实上，公司正在尽快的转变过去那种印刷经营模式。Schibsted的网络业务5年前还有过亏损，不过去年占到了营业利润的35%。
News of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out how the Norwegians have done it. “Otherwise we'd get several visits every month,” he says. The company has used its established newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses such as Sesam, a search engine that competes with Google, and FINN.no, a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was the company's best ever for revenues and profits.
Schibsted网络经营的成功消息很快传遍了整个报纸行业。海外业务部的副总经理Sverre Munck说，Schibsted每年都要防止来访的外国代表团把挪威人的成功经验学走。他说：“不这样的话，我们每个月就要接待几次来访”。这家公司用自己的报纸品牌建立了网站，并且在斯堪的纳维亚半岛分列第一和第二。它也开办了新的网络公司，例如和Google竞争的Sesam，还有分类广告门户FINN.no。
Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.
不幸的是，在整个报纸行业中，Schibsted是一个非常罕见的特例。对于发达国家里大多数报纸公司，2005年是痛苦的一年。他们几乎还是在靠自己的印刷品过活，而且这部分利润在逐年缩水。当人们开始从网上了解新闻，年轻人也不喜欢阅读印刷品时，付费报纸发行量年年下滑。报纸也在丧失广告收入的份额。分类广告很快住到了网上。报业贸易协会IFRA的合资咨询公司iMedia，其顾问Jim Chisholm，预测十年后，分类广告的市场将全部被数字媒体占领。总体上，iMedia指出，1995年全球报纸的广告收入占36％，2005年这个数字是30％。它计算，到2015年，报纸还会丧失掉五个百分点。
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry?“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year?but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.
就算是最自信的报业老板，Schibsted的老板也是一样，都不得不承认，他们只有在互联网、手机、其他能上网设备等，新兴的媒体平台上彻底改造自己的公司，他们才有机会生存下来。Rupert Murdoch去年的演讲中还称，大多数公司开始磨磨蹭蹭的想办法适应这种波及整个行业的影响了---“这太明显了，莫名其妙的自满得意”---但是现在他们的动作快多了。许多公司的互联网广告业务在快速成长并且逐渐取代了一些印刷版的份额。
Newspapers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested. In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.
报业公司的自满，恐怕还不像Mr Murdoch说的那么温和。在发达国家，报社的老板几十年来享受着近乎垄断的市场，丰厚的利润，更高的行业资本回报率。在过去，报纸公司认为没有什么必要有所革新，所以就基本上不在研究和开发上投资。
Set in print
固守印刷报纸
At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else's website.
最初，从九十年代末到2002年左右，报纸公司只是简单的把印刷版报纸上的内容搬到网上。然而，网络提供了定制的新闻和娱乐节目，这就让读者可以准确的从不同的网站上找到自己想要的内容。结果，人们就不太访问报纸网站了，经常也只是草草浏览两三页就去看别的网站了。
Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand's prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at La Stampa, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper's internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.
另外一个错误，就是报纸把自己最好的新闻力量用在印刷版的报纸上。这就意味着网上提供的新闻质量通常没有那么好。那时，网站雇佣年轻的，廉价的雇员。过去，人们只认识印刷版的品牌，这样就鼓励了那些优秀的新闻记者固守印刷版领地。在意大利，Fiat Group拥有的一个意大利日报La Stampa，其网站总监Anna Masera说，公司的新闻记者们不愿把自己的故事放在网站上，因为他们害怕这样会蚕食报纸的发行量。
For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet. At its most basic, that means reporting stories using cameras and microphones as well as print. The results can be encouraging. America's Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has introduced a new Emmy award for news and documentaries on the internet, mobile phones and personal media players. Five of the seven nominations for this September have gone to reports by nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com.
不过，在过去的两年里，报纸公司已经在考虑他们能在互联网上该做些什么事情了。以最基础的方式，通过照相机和麦克风还有印刷品作报道。这种做法的结果令人鼓舞。美国电视艺术和科学研究会建议艾美奖增设一些奖项，用来鼓励互联网，手机和个人媒体播放器上的新闻和记录片。提名一共有7个，其中5个已经揭晓了，将会在这个九月份于nytimes.com和washingtonpost.com上公布。
It also means being more imaginative. In the late 1990s, the early years of the Wall Street Journal's website, one of the paper's journalists came up with the novel idea of posting online a 573-page document that backed up an article. “It wasn't the most compelling content,” remembers Neil Budde, its founding editor and now general manager of news at Yahoo!, an internet portal. But it was a start. Now newspapers have a better idea of what works online. This is not always traditional journalism as taught in journalism school. Brian Tierney, who became owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer after Knight Ridder sold it last year, noticed that a popular item on the paper's website has been a video of Mentos mints causing a 2-litre bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. “We should do more of that,” he says.
这意味着要更有想象力。九十年代末，华尔街日报的一个新闻记者产生了一个新奇想法，他要在公司早期的网站上刊登一份573页的文献，用以支持另一篇文章里的内容。“那还不是最令人佩服的点子” Neil Budde回忆道，这位华尔街日报网站的开山编辑，现在是Yahoo!新闻部门的总经理。但是这只是一个开始。现在的报纸公司知道什么东西应该放在网上。这可不是新闻学校里上的传统新闻学课程。Knight Ridder出售Philadelphia Inquirer后，Brian Tierney就成为了其老板，他发现网站上有一个，装有Mentos薄荷糖的2升可乐瓶在空中爆炸的视频节目非常受欢迎。他说：“我们应该做更多类似的节目”。
More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. “Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet,” says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, “but now we know we've got to use our very best.” Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. “It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations,” says Oscar Bronner, publisher of Der Standard, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.
越来越多的报纸公司现在把自己的网站摆在首位。“以前，报纸公司只派2，3线的新闻记者到互联网上”英国电报集团的网站总编辑，Edward Roussel说，“可是现在，我们明白了，要把最好的记者投入到其中去”。许多公司正把这两方面的工作人员安排在一起工作，这么一来，印刷版报纸的写手同时也在提供网上内容，反过来也一样。一些人还坚信这样做不合适。澳大利亚日报Der Standard的发行商Oscar Bronner说：“不把报纸和网络区分开就完全错了”。他称，印刷版的记者没有时间思考和分析同样的文章是不是在网上也有好的效果。
Running to stand still
行动起来
How impressive are the results of these online experiments? At lots of newspaper companies, internet advertising is growing by at least 30% a year, and often more. At la Repubblica in Italy, for instance, the paper's website gets about 1m visitors a day, nearly double the circulation of the printed paper. The value of online ads grew by 70% in the first half of 2006. For the first three months of 2006, the Newspaper Association of America announced that advertising for all the country's newspaper websites grew by 35% from the same period in 2005, to a total of $613m. But to put that in perspective, print and online ads together grew by only 1.8%, to $11 billion, because print advertising was flat. At almost all newspapers the internet brings in less than a tenth of revenues and profits. At this point, says Mr Chisholm, “newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online.”
这些网上的实践效果有多显著呢？对于许多报纸公司，网络广告业务每年至少增长30％，而且通常更多。例如意大利的la Repubblica，网站每天有1百万的访问量，几乎是报纸发行量的一倍。网络广告的收入在2006年上半年增长了70％。美国报纸协会宣布，2006年的头三个月，全国的报纸网站广告收入与去年同比增长了35％，达到了6亿1千3百万美元。但是，整体上，因为印刷品广告占得份额很大，所以印刷品和网上的广告总收入才增长了1.8％，达到110亿美元。对于几乎所有报纸公司，网络只带来了十分之一的收入和利润。因此，Mr Chisholm说：“报纸公司在对网络读者的认识上还有一半的路要走，对于网络业务的建设方面只走了一成的路”。
The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a “haphazard and fragmented way”. Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader. Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online. But even that is a daunting multiple.
问题在于网络读者不像印刷版读者那样实实在在的提高了收入。除了报纸，其他的内容在网上都是免费的，所以他们很快就放弃了印刷品。人们阅读的网络页面比他们手里的报纸少，对广告客户来说这一点降低了网络广告的价值。位于巴黎的世界报纸协会，其主席Gavin O'Reilly说，报纸读者比网络读者更有价值，网络读者用“偶然和零乱的方式”使用报纸网站。最近，咨询公司Digital Deliverance的Vin Crosbie估计道，如果失去了一个报纸读者，那么就需要20到100个网络读者来弥补损失。许多报业老板都会说这太悲观了：例如一家英国报纸就计算，这个数字是1比10。不过，即使这样也是一个令人畏缩的倍数。
Newspapers today concentrate on only two parts of the market for internet advertising. They earn little or nothing from internet search, which is bigger than either display or classified ads. Especially in America, newspapers rely heavily on classified ads online and have fewer display ads, says Mr Crosbie. Elsewhere, the pattern may be reversed, but newspapers still lack a broad base of internet-advertising revenue; for instance, Juan Luis Cebrián, chief executive of Grupo PRISA, the owner of El Pais, says the Spanish newspaper is enjoying strong growth in display advertising, but has few online classified ads.
报纸公司现在只专注于互联网广告市场的两个部分。他们基本不从互联网搜索赚钱，而这却比显示性广告和分类广告丰厚。特别是在美国，Mr Crosbie说，报纸公司都十分那依赖在线分类广告，并且还有一些显示性广告。在别处，这种模式也许会被扭转，但是报纸还是缺乏更加形式多样的广告收入模式：例如，PRISA集团的老板兼总经理Juan Luis Cebrián说，西班牙报纸正在享受显示性广告的强劲增长，却几乎没有多少在线分类广告收入。
On the other hand, newspapers' websites have higher profit margins than print does, because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. The Wall Street Journal is one of the few papers that charges for its content online. Others may follow suit, especially if growth in advertising slows. The online business model is still in flux, argues Richard Zannino, chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The average price of ad space in the printed paper is now only three times higher than on Wall Street Journal Online, says Mr Zannino, compared with six to seven times for the industry as a whole in America. He expects the relative price of an internet ad to rise.
不过另一方面，报纸公司的网站有比印刷报纸更高的利润率，因为网站不用纸张，也用不着支付递送报纸的费用。华尔街日报是少数几个对其网上内容收费的报纸。其他公司也会跟进，特别是当广告收入增长放缓。华尔街日报的发行商Dow Jones & Company，其总经理Richard Zannino说，网上业务模型还处在不断变化的阶段。Mr Zannino说，与华尔街日报在线版相比，其印刷版的广告平均价格只是它的三倍多，这一数字是整个美国同行业的6到7倍。他预期，整体网络广告相关的价格会上涨。
The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge [Eurpean currency label here which can block subsequence]19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.
从Schibsted的经验看来，在网上赚钱的秘密不是依靠像Google和Yahoo!那样的新闻聚合器。到Schibsted的VG和Aftonbladet版面的连接，其中有四分之三是从其自己的网站主页来的，只有四分之一来自别处。“如果访问者都是从Google连接到此，浏览网页，之后离开”Mr Munck说：“Google将得到的是美元，而我们得到的是美分，但是如果我们能让这些读者从我们的主页连接到他们想看的内容，我们就能从24小时的标语广告中获取1万9千欧元（2万5千美元）”。大多数报纸公司不屑这样的经验，还是在依赖着新闻聚合器赚钱。
The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious----having excellent websites and selling ad space on them----may not be enough. The papers with the best chance of seeing their revenues grow are those experimenting with entirely new businesses online and off.
报纸公司的危险是，他们在互联网上的所有努力可能只是在延缓他们的衰落。做这些显而易见的事情----拥有出色的网站并且出售广告空间----可能还不够。那些正在尝试全新的在线和离线业务的公司，其收入增长很可能会增长。
Some are launching profitable new ventures that are only indirectly related to journalism. Schibsted, for instance, has started an online slimming club, called Viktklubben.se, using its Aftonbladet newspaper brand. Viktklubben.se charges its 54,000 members [Eurpean currency label here which can block subsequence]50 each every three months. The Telegraph Group in Britain uses the Daily Telegraph to sell readers everything from goose-down pillows to Valentine's Day topiary baskets to insurance. The division now contributes close to a third of the firm's total profits, according to an executive at the company. “Newspapers will have to get into new businesses and extract more value from their audience,” says Paul Zwillenberg, global head of media and entertainment at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. Examples like these are fairly rare, though. Most newspaper companies still insist that producing high-quality journalism and distributing it in new ways will be enough to keep them growing.
对与新闻没有直接联系的项目投资是有利可图。例如，Schibsted用它Aftonbladet品牌的报纸开办了一个网上减肥俱乐部Viktklubben.se。在5万4千名会员中，Viktklubben.se对位会员每三周收取50欧元会费。英国电报集团通过其每日电报，向读者出售鹅绒软毛枕头，瓦伦丁的日常灌木丛篮子，和包括保险在内的各种东西。公司的一位高级主管透露，这部分收入接近公司总收入的第三大项。位于伦敦的战略咨询公司OC&C，其媒体和娱乐部门的全球主管Paul Zwillenberg 说：“报纸要投入到新业务当中去，并且发掘出读者更多的价值”。不过类似上面这两个例子的公司还十分罕见。许多报纸公司仍然坚信，要保持增长，就要推出高质量的报章杂志，并且用新的方法递送。
It's the journalism, stupid
傻瓜，报纸就是报纸
Consultants advising newspaper groups argue that they need to adjust their output. Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic. On the internet, especially, says Mr Chisholm, they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities----the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments. Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next. This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.
为报纸公司服务的咨询顾问们称，这些公司要调整自己的产量。对读者阅读口味的研究早就指出，人们喜欢与他们生活相关的短故事和新闻：地方消息，体育，娱乐，天气和交通。Mr Chisholm说，尤其是在互联网上，人们在寻找提高其生活质量的方法。海外事务的长篇大论的优先级很低----现在更是如此，因为互联网让人们瞬间就可以搜查到国际新闻的标题。难以区分每份报纸中的国内国际新闻的封面。读者这样的映像加剧了这么一种情况，报纸公司为了省钱，它们大肆洗劫记者那里的消息并且从路透社一样的通讯社机构劫掠新闻副本。一个专门研究美国报纸的公司Belden Associates，其总经理Sammy Papert 说：“我们的研究表明，人们要从报纸中得到更多有实用性价值的东西”。人们希望报纸可以告诉自己怎么富起来，还有晚上的事该怎么做。（哈哈）
Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos” ----mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs. Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, recently launched a new home-delivered free paper for Bluffton, a fast-growing area of Beaufort, South Carolina, called Bluffton Today, with a page of national news, one of international and the rest “hyper-local”. Its website has pictures and blogs from readers and detailed community information. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call ‘chicken-dinner news’ ----the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing,” says Will Morris, the firm's president. “But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers.”
在这些研究上花了钱，可还是没多少新闻公司听得进去这样的话，他们倾向于把这些话抛到脑后。大部分记者，比起个人理财来说，终究更喜欢撰写阿富汗事务。不过有些公司开始倾听这样的声音了。全球最大的新闻集团Gannett，正在努力让自己的记者团队更加本地化。它投资“mojos” ----配有无线上网移动笔记本的记者，这些人不在办公室工作，他们在社区中心扎营。位于奥古斯塔和乔治亚州的Morris通讯，最近为Bluffton地区启动了一个新的无纸家庭递送服务。Bluffton是波佛特海快速成长的地区，它位于南加州，现在叫Bluffton。这项服务有一页内容的国内新闻，一条国际新闻，其它的都是“超本地”的。它的网站里有读者的图片和blog，还有详尽的社区信息。公司的主管Morris 说：“回到40年代和50年代报纸中去，经常都是关于‘鸡肉庆祝晚宴的新闻’----城市酒吧的喇叭里传来了谁的女儿赢得了独木舟比赛的蓝带”。“但也就是那个时候，报纸开始失去了和读者的联系”。
The more adventurous newspaper companies, like Morris Communications, are showing themselves willing to embrace content and opinions from readers. Rather like OhmyNews, a Korean “citizen-journalism” operation that many people think heralds the future for news-gathering, Schibsted exhorts its readers to send information and photographs. When a mentally disturbed man ran amok and killed people on a tram in Oslo in 2004, it was a reader with a mobile-phone camera who sent VG its front-page picture of the arrest. At Zero Hora, a Brazilian paper owned by RBS Group, the circulation department asks 120 readers what they think of the paper every day and Marcelo Rech, the editor, receives a report at 1pm. “They usually want more of our supplements on cooking and houses and less of Hizbullah and earthquakes,” says Mr Rech.
像Morris通讯，越来越多有魄力的报业公司愿意接受读者的满意度和意见。不像韩国的“公民新闻”业务OhmyNews，许多人将其看作是未来的新闻一箩筐，Schibsted恳请读者反馈一些信息和照片。2004年奥斯陆的一精神分裂男子疯狂的在有轨电车上杀人时，是一个读者用自己的手机拍下了此人被捕的照片，并登上了VG的封面。在RBS集团下属的巴西报纸Zero Hora，每天，发行部门都会询问120名读者，征求他们对当日报纸的看法。编辑Marcelo Rech就会在下午1点得到一份读者报告。Mr Rech说：“通常，人们希望我们的报纸能够提供更多有关烹饪和住房的内容，少一些真主党和地震的消息”。
Still more changes to the content and form of newspapers are likely as businesspeople gain power at newspaper firms. “You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial,” says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the Wall Street Journal, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time. For the moment, the trend towards greater commercialism is most evident in America, but is likely to spread elsewhere as newspaper companies struggle financially. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr Tierney, a former advertising executive, shocked people by announcing that he would bring in an advertising person to redesign the paper----traditionally a task strictly for editorial. In future, businesspeople are likely to insist that newspapers adopt practices that are already standard in other industries. Mr Tierney, for instance, says it is unreasonable to expect everyone from the age of 18 to 88 to buy the same product. The industry needs to sell papers for different age and demographic groups, he says.
不过，就像人们在报纸公司里面争夺权力一样，报纸仍然有许多内容和形式上的变化。麦肯锡的合伙人Henrik Poppe 说：“你不会看到很多纯洁的报纸…这些公司会变得更加商业化”。像华尔街日报，龙头报纸们近来都罕见的把广告放登在了首页上。此时，在美国，重商主义的趋势更甚，但是很有可能波及不到报业，因为这些公司都陷入了财务困难。根据费城调查机构的调查，一位前广告主管Mr Tierney，语出惊人的宣称他要雇佣一个广告人来重新设计报纸面版----这种工作传统上都是主编做的。未来，报纸也会采用其他行业中的标准。例如，Mr Tierney说如果让18岁到88岁的人购买同样的东西，那这就太没有道理了。他说，要依据年龄和人口统计来出售报纸。
The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people. Roughly 28m copies of free newspapers are now printed daily, according to Metro International, a Swedish firm that pioneered them in 1995. In markets where they are published, they account for 8% of daily circulation on average, according to iMedia. That share is rising. In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180. Metro's papers reach young, affluent readers and are even able to charge a premium for advertising in some markets compared with paid-for papers.
传统报纸公司的最大的进步在于其免费日报的广泛成功，就像互联网可以让年轻人享受各种流行事物一样。1995年就开始研究这个领域的瑞士公司Metro International粗略估计，全球每天大概印刷了2千8百万份免费报纸。iMedia的数字是，在市场上刊印的免费报纸占到了日报总发行量的8％。这部分的比例正在增长。在欧洲，这个数字高达16％。Metro的计算指出，免费报纸的社论成本是收费报纸的一半。实际上这意味着，需要10万份免费报纸的发行量才可以让广告收入足以雇佣20个记者，而收费报纸只需要卖出180份就够了。Metro报纸的读者群年轻富有，比起收费报纸，它甚至还可以在某些市场上对广告收取附加费。
“The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time,” says Pelle T?rnberg, Metro's chief executive. Mr T?rnberg says the only way that paid-for papers will prosper is by becoming more specialised, raising their prices and investing in better editorial. People read freesheets in their millions, on the other hand, because Metro and others reach them on their journey to work, when they have time to read, and spare them the hassle of having to hand over change to a newsagent.
Metro 的总经理Pelle T?rnberg 说：“收费报纸最大的敌人就是时间”。Mr T?rnberg说收费报纸复兴的唯一方法就是，变得更加独特，提高费用，并且投资制作更好的社论。上百万人阅读免费报纸，不过都是在上班路上阅读像Metro这样的免费报纸。当读者比较有空阅读的时候，它们还会与读者分享那些是否要把报纸公司变成通讯社的争论。
Some traditional newspaper firms dismiss free papers, saying they are not profitable. Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of la Repubblica, for instance, says that Metro loses money in Italy and that other freesheets are struggling. Globally, however, Metro has just become profitable.
一些传统报纸公司解散了免费报纸业务，因为它们称其不赚钱。例如la Repubblica的发行商Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso，其主席Carlo De Benedetti就说Metro在意大利亏损，而且其它的免费报纸也在煎熬着。但是在全球范围上，Metro是盈利的。
Consultants say that lots of traditional newspaper companies are planning to hold their noses and launch free dailies. In France, for instance, Le Monde is planning a new free daily, and Mr Murdoch's News International is preparing a new free afternoon paper for London, to be launched next month. Deciding whether or not to start a freesheet, indeed, perfectly encapsulates the unpalatable choice that faces the paid-for newspaper industry today as it attempts to find a future for itself. Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach----or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.
顾问们说许多传统报纸公司无奈的开始顺应潮流，创办免费日报。例如，在法国，Le Monde在策划的一种新的免费日报，Mr Murdoch的News International正在为伦敦准备的一个新的免费晚报，都将在下个月开始发行。对于寻找出路的收费报纸来说，决定开办免费报纸的确是一剂苦药。在接下来的几年里，它们必须决定是否要放弃“杰出报刊”的理念，转而走更加富有创新力、更加商业化的路----不然就会成为博物馆当中的藏品。
