现在，新闻行业正在回到类似咖啡馆时代的场景。互联网让新闻更具参与性、社交性、多样性、争议性，再现了百花齐放、百家争鸣的胜景。这将对社会和政治产生深远的影响。

　　向西

　　在全球大部分地区，大众媒体方兴未艾。从2005年到2009年全球报纸发行量增长增长了6%，印度等国家需求尤为旺盛，目前每天报纸销量达1.1亿份。但这些全球数字掩盖了发达国家报纸阅读量骤降的趋势。

　　在过去十年间，在整个西方世界，人们开始放弃新闻报纸和电视新闻，开始通过截然不同的方式参与活动。最出人意料的是越来越多普通人开始参与编纂、分享、过滤、讨论和传播新闻。Twitter允许人们在任何地方报道眼前发生的事情。机密文件被发布到网上，一传数千份。阿拉伯起义和美国龙卷风的手机视频被发布到社交网站上，并被电视新闻广播引用。日本地震期间的一段业余视频在YouTube上已经被观看了1500万次。众包项目把读者和记者聚到一起，一起筛选文件，其中包括英国政客的财务数字和萨拉?佩林的电子邮件。社交网站帮助人们发现、讨论并分享新闻。

　　挑战媒体精英的不仅仅是普通读者。Google、Facebook和Twitter等科技公司已经成为重要的新闻渠道。名人和奥巴马、雨果?查韦斯等世界领袖开始通过社交网站直接发布更新；很多国家开始通过“开放政府”计划提供原始信息。互联网让人们可以阅读全球各地的报纸，观看全球各地的电视，英国报纸《卫报》的海外在线读者数已经超过了英国本土。互联网在短期内催生了新的新闻提供者，比如独立博客和Huffington Post等新闻聚合网站。互联网带来了全新的新闻方式，比如维基解密（Wiki Leaks）给爆料者提供了匿名发布文件的方式。新闻已经不再控制在BBC等媒体机构和国有渠道手中。

　　我搭台你唱戏

　　实际上每个自由派都应该庆祝这样的事情。一个参与性和社交性更强的新闻环境，加上新闻来源的多样性和广泛性，这是件好事。过去只能依靠《休斯顿纪事报》解读世界的人现在可以通过不同的来源收集信息。全球各地的独裁者的日子越来越不好过。那么，很多人会问，如果记者的工作没那么稳定该怎么办？会出现两种担忧，殊途同归。

　　第一种担心是失去新闻问责制（account ability journalism）。在平面媒体中，收入的减少已经导致新闻调查和以及本地政治报道的数量的减少和质量的降低。

　　但传统新闻本来在道德上就没有新闻记者想象中那么正直。英国的《世界新闻报》被曝入侵用户的手机，这是很传统的丑闻。与此同时，互联网正在催生新型的问责制。越来越多的非营利机构，比如ProPublica，SunlightFoundation和维基解密，开始填补监管媒体没落留下的空白。这种问责制尚未成熟，但其活跃程度和实验研究比较乐观。

　　第二种担忧是党派之争（partisanship）。在大众媒体时代，本地垄断者通常不得不保持相对的客观性，从而吸引更多读者和广告主。在一个竞争更加激烈的世界里，金钱似乎正在唤起人们的偏见，因此，保守的美国有线新闻频道福克斯新闻所得利润超过了CNN和MSNBC利润之和，后两家新闻机构则没有那么尖锐。

　　一方面越来越多的党派新闻受到了人们的欢迎。过去很多人，尤其是右翼美国人根本看不到反映自己观点的电视新闻，因为美国大部分电视被左倾派系控制。但随着新闻的观点性越来越强，政治新闻和事实新闻都在遭受挑战：有些保守派美国人坚持认为奥巴马诞生在美国之外，另一些人则拒绝接受加税。

The internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media

Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition

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THREE hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides. “The Coffee houses particularly are very commodious for a free Conversation, and for reading at an easie Rate all manner of printed News,” noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. At the time of the launch America’s bestselling paper sold just 4,500 copies a day; the Sun, with its steam press, soon reached 15,000. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.

Now, as our special report explains, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The internet is making news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan, reviving the discursive ethos of the era before mass media. That will have profound effects on society and politics.

In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009, helped by particularly strong demand in places like India, where 110m papers are now sold daily. But those global figures mask a sharp decline in readership in rich countries.

Over the past decade, throughout the Western world, people have been giving up newspapers and TV news and keeping up with events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and distributing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classified documents are published in their thousands online. Mobile-phone footage of Arab uprisings and American tornadoes is posted on social-networking sites and shown on television newscasts. An amateur video taken during the Japanese earthquake has been watched 15m times on YouTube. “Crowdsourcing” projects bring readers and journalists together to sift through troves of documents, from the expense claims of British politicians to Sarah Palin’s e-mails. Social-networking sites help people find, discuss and share news with their friends.

And it is not just readers who are challenging the media elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter have become important (some say too important) conduits of news. Celebrities and world leaders, including Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez, publish updates directly via social networks; many countries now make raw data available through “open government” initiatives. The internet lets people read newspapers or watch television channels from around the world: the Guardian, a British newspaper, now has more online readers abroad than at home. The web has allowed new providers of news, from individual bloggers to sites such as the Huffington Post, to rise to prominence in a very short space of time. And it has made possible entirely new approaches to journalism, such as that practised by WikiLeaks, which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets, like the BBC.

We contort, you deride

In principle, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment, with a remarkable diversity and range of news sources, is a good thing. A Texan who once had to rely on the Houston Chronicle to interpret the world can now collect information from myriad different sources. Authoritarian rulers everywhere have more to fear. So what, many will say, if journalists have less stable careers? All the same, two areas of concern stand out.

The first worry is the loss of “accountability journalism”, which holds the powerful to account. Shrinking revenues have reduced the amount and quality of investigative and local political reporting in the print press.

But old-style journalism was never quite as morally upstanding as journalists like to think. Indeed, the News of the World, a British newspaper which has been caught hacking into people’s mobile phones, is a very traditional sort of scandal sheet (see article). Meantime, the internet is spawning new forms of accountability. A growing band of non-profit outfits such as ProPublica, the Sunlight Foundation and WikiLeaks are helping to fill the gap left by the decline of watchdog media. This is still a work in progress, but the degree of activity and experimentation provides cause for optimism.

The second concern has to do with partisanship. In the mass-media era local monopolies often had to be relatively impartial to maximise their appeal to readers and advertisers. In a more competitive world the money seems to be in creating an echo chamber for people’s prejudices: thus Fox News, a conservative American cable-news channel, makes more profits than its less strident rivals, CNN and MSNBC, combined.

In one way the increasing availability of partisan news is to be welcomed. In the past many people—especially right-wing Americans, since most American television was left-leaning—had nothing to watch that reflected their views. But as news is becoming more opinionated, both politics and the facts are suffering: witness some American conservatives’ insistence that Barack Obama was born outside America, and others’ refusal to accept that taxes must rise (see article).

What is to be done? At a societal level, not much. The transformation of the news business is unstoppable, and attempts to reverse it are doomed to failure. But there are steps individuals can take to mitigate these worries. As producers of new journalism, they can be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources. As consumers, they can be catholic in their tastes and demanding in their standards. And although this transformation does raise concerns, there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the age of the internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.