The internet era has not been kind to newspaper publishers. It has almost killed classified advertising¹, accelerated a decline in circulation and directed eyeballs towards a seemingly infinite supply of blogs, videos and websites.

报刊出版商在互联网时代的日子一直不太好过。互联网几乎消灭了分类广告，加速了发行量的下降，吸引人们的眼球转向貌似无止境的博客、视频和网站。

But after more than a decade of struggling to keep up with disruptive technology, a glimmer² of hope has brightened the pervading³ gloom in the industry. And with that hope comes the very source of so many of its woes⁴: Silicon⁵ Valley.

但在苦苦紧跟这一颠覆性的科技10多年后，一道希望的曙光照进了这个普遍悲观的行业。伴随这希望而来的，是造成报刊业许多不幸的根源：硅谷。

Apple and Facebook have announced news services that could potentially create an important revenue stream for publishers, broaden their readership and — eventually — offer them a direct path to paying subscribers.

苹果(Apple)和Facebook分别宣布了新闻服务，此类服务潜在有望为出版商开辟一条重要的收入来源，拓宽它们的读者群，最终为它们提供争取付费订户的直接路径。

Facebook has enlisted⁶ nine publishers for its Instant Articles services, which has already launched in limited form in the US with content from BuzzFeed, The Atlantic and The New York Times. (It plans to start the service in Europe soon.) Apple, meanwhile, has signed up dozens of publishers for Apple News — a Flipboard-style app which launches in the autumn — including The New York Times, The Guardian⁷, The Economist⁸ and the Financial Times.

Facebook的Instant Articles服务已与9家出版商达成合作。目前Instant Articles已在美国以有限形式推出，内容来自BuzzFeed、《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)和《纽约时报》(New York Times)。Facebook计划尽快在欧洲推出该服务。与此同时，苹果的Apple News也与几十家出版商签订了协议，其中包括《纽约时报》、《卫报》(Guardian)、《经济学人》(The Economist)以及英国《金融时报》(Financial Times)。Apple News是一款类似Flipboard的应用，定于今年秋季推出。

Given the industry’s bruising⁹ experiences, it is perhaps natural that publishers have greeted the new services with a mixture of fear and optimism. Mark Thompson, chief executive of The New York Times, points to the benefits of being able provide its news content to a vast new audience. “We’re talking about an opportunity to distribute your content at no charge at all to well over 1bn people,” he says. “[Facebook] has a larger population than the People’s Republic of China.”

出版商对这些新服务的情绪交织着乐观与恐惧，鉴于出版业的坎坷经历，这或许也是自然反应。《纽约时报》首席执行官马克?汤普森(Mark Thompson)指出，这些服务的好处是能够将该报的新闻内容提供给庞大的新受众群体。他说：“我们谈论的是一个免费向远远超过10亿人分发内容的机会。（Facebook）的用户群比中华人民共和国的人口还多。”

But there are concerns that Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles — which are not paying for the content — will chip away at the notion of a newspaper or magazine website as a standalone brand to be digested whole, rather than broken up into individual stories and scattered¹¹ across different apps. The services could “dilute¹² [publisher] brands as destination sites and?.?.?.? boost the platform brand”, says Gordon Crovitz, a media adviser¹³ and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Apple News和Facebook Instant Articles不会为这些内容付费，有人因此担心，此类服务会削弱报刊网站作为独立品牌、供读者整体消化（而不是分解成个别的报道，散播在不同的应用里）的概念。媒体顾问、《华尔街日报》(Wall Street Journal)前出版人戈登?克罗维茨(Gordon Crovitz)表示，这些新闻服务“将（出版商）品牌淡化成一个个目标站点……却提升了平台的品牌”。

Publishers have also privately¹⁴ voiced concerns about the power Apple and Facebook will wield¹⁵ and the potential harm the new aggregation¹⁶ services could cause to paid subscription¹⁷ models. Apple has told publishers its service will eventually include subscription capability¹⁸ and, like Facebook, has told them they will be able to keep all the advertising revenue they generate. But neither company has ruled out changing this arrangement in the future.

各家出版商私下也表示，担心苹果和Facebook将拥有的实力，担心新的新闻聚合服务潜在可能给付费订阅模式带来的损害。苹果向合作出版商表示，它的服务最终将包括订阅功能，同时苹果和Facebook都表示，出版商将可以保留自己产生的全部广告收入。但两家公司都不排除未来改变这一安排。

Facebook and Apple have a shared aim: increasing the amount of time their users spend on their services, which are increasingly being accessed via smartphones. Smartphones have become the dominant¹⁹ way to read news: this year will mark the first time that smartphones were responsible for 50 per cent of news consumption, up from 25 per cent in 2012, according to Ken¹⁰ Doctor, an analyst²⁰ with Newsonomics.

Facebook和苹果有一个共同目标，那就是延长用户使用其服务的时间，越来越多的用户在通过智能手机访问新闻服务。智能手机已成为阅读新闻的主要方式，据Newsonomics分析师肯?多克托(Ken Doctor)表示，2012年智能手机用户新闻消费占比25%，今年这一比例将首次达到50%。

Driving Facebook and Apple’s interest in news “is the arrival of the smartphone as the primary access point for many readers”, he says. A publisher who has had negotiations²¹ with both companies puts it differently. Facebook and Apple have “finally woken up to the fact that news has value on mobile”.

多克托说，Facebook和苹果之所以对新闻感兴趣，是因为“对于许多读者来说，智能手机作为主要接入点的时代已经到来了。”一位与两家公司都进行过谈判的出版商则有不同说法。Facebook和苹果“终于意识到新闻对于移动设备是有价值的。”

Publishing boost

出版业的利好

Two of the world’s biggest technology companies identifying value in a sector²² written off by many other investors²³ would normally be cause for celebration in an industry that has lately not had much to cheer about. In the US, combined newspaper advertising revenues from print and digital sources tumbled from close to $50bn in 2005 to $20bn last year, according to the Pew Research Center. In that period, digital advertising revenues on newspaper websites increased from $2bn to just $3.5bn.

对于一个已经被许多投资者放弃的行业来说，全球两大科技巨头看出该行业的价值，按理是一个庆祝的理由。这个行业近年没多少事情值得欣慰。根据皮尤研究中心(Pew Research Center)的数据，美国报纸的印刷和数字两块广告收入加到一起，从2005年近500亿美元，下降到2014年的200亿美元。在此期间，报纸网站的数字广告收入仅从20亿美元增长到35亿美元。

Circulation has not fared much better. In the US, audited²⁵ circulation has fallen as much as 50 per cent for some large daily newspapers in cities such as Miami and San Francisco since 2005, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media. The picture is similarly bleak²⁶ in the UK: The Sun, the biggest selling UK newspaper, has lost 1m readers since 2008, according to figures from the Audit²⁴ Bureau of Circulation, while other tabloids²⁷ and broadsheets are also selling fewer copies. In the past 12 months sales of daily UK newspapers fell 7.6 per cent to an average of a little more than 7m.

发行量的表现也好不到哪里去。根据美国审计媒体联盟(Alliance for Audited Media, AAM)的数据，在迈阿密、旧金山等城市，自2005年以来一些主流日报的认证发行量下降多达50%。英国的情况同样惨淡，根据发行量审计局(Audit Bureau of Circulation, ABC)的数据，自2008年以来，英国销量最大的《太阳报》(The Sun)失去了100万名读者，其他小报和大报的发行量也逐年下降。过去12个月期间英国日报销售量下跌7.6%，每天平均只有700万多一点。

Most large circulation dailies have introduced paywalls to replace revenues lost by falling print sales and advertising, but with limited success. The New York Times has close to 1m digital-only subscriptions²⁸, for example, while the Wall Street Journal has amassed²⁹ 724,000 paying digital readers. But Tribune Publishing, which owns 10 daily titles including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun, had just 67,000 paying subscribers across its portfolio³⁰ at the end of the first quarter, according to a company filing.

销量较大的日报大多已采用付费墙模式，以弥补印刷报纸销量和广告下降所带来的收入损失，但效果有限。例如《纽约时报》的纯数字订阅接近100万，而《华尔街日报》争取到72.4万付费数字读者。但根据公司监管申报文件，旗下拥有《洛杉矶时报》(Los Angeles Times)、《芝加哥论坛报》(Chicago Tribune)和《巴尔的摩太阳报》(Baltimore Sun)等10份日报的Tribune Publishing，在今年第一季度末总共只有6.7万付费数字读者。

While publishers grapple with the transition to digital, appetite for online news is soaring on social media. The trend is epitomised by the growth of free sites such as BuzzFeed, which specialise in viral content. “Search is less prevalent and social apps become much more prevalent in content discovery,” says Mr Thompson.

在出版商艰难把握向数字化过渡的同时，社交媒体对在线新闻的胃口不断高涨。这一趋势体现于一些免费网站的增长，例如专门发布病毒式内容的BuzzFeed。《纽约时报》的汤普森说：“在内容发现方面，搜索已经不那么流行了，社交应用正变得日益盛行。”

For years, Google News “dominated outside discovery of news online”, says Mr Doctor. Publishers chafed³¹ at its strength and market power but “now they have a new source of traffic” — Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News — “that has more promise of monetisation”. Other news apps, such as Flipboard, have failed to break out as a niche³². Will Facebook and instant articles fare differently?

Newsonomics的多克托说，谷歌新闻(Google News)多年来“主导着在线新闻的外部发现”，它的实力和市场威力让出版商郁闷，但“现在他们有了新的流量来源（Facebook Instant Articles与Apple News），这一来源更有创收希望。”其他新闻应用，比如Flipboard，未能突破小众市场的格局。Facebook和Instant Articles会有不同结局吗？

Demand for news

对新闻的需求

Facebook is well established in referring its users to news sites. Google is the top referrer online and was the source of about 41 per cent of all web traffic between January and February this year. But social media, led by Facebook, is eating into its lead, generating about 36 per cent of traffic referrals, according to Parse³³.ly, an analytics provider.

Facebook早已开始将用户推送至新闻网站。谷歌是最大的在线引荐者，今年1月至2月间是大约41%网站流量的来源。但分析提供商Parse.ly的数据显示，以Facebook为首的社交媒体正在蚕食谷歌的领先份额，产生了36%的流量。

Almost a third of US adults read or watch news on Facebook, just under half the 64 per cent who use the social network, according to data from the Pew Research Center published in September. This compares with 8 per cent of US adults who find their news on Twitter.

皮尤研究中心去年9月发布的数据显示，几乎三分之一的美国成年人在Facebook上阅读或观看新闻，略低于使用该社交网络的64%美国成年人的一半。相比之下，只有8%的美国成年人从Twitter获得新闻。

Facebook wants to increase the time its users spend on the platform: news lures³⁴ people back to its mobile app more frequently and encourages them to linger there for longer. However, stories that link away from its news feed to other sites take additional seconds to load. “People don’t want to wait that long so a lot of people abandon news before it has even loaded,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, says.

Facebook希望增加用户在其平台上所花的时间：新闻可以更频繁地吸引人们回到移动应用，并鼓励他们逗留更长时间。然而，其推送链接至其他网站的新闻需要额外的几秒钟进行加载。Facebook首席执行官马克?扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)说：“人们不想等那么久，所以，很多人在这些新闻网页加载前就放弃它们了。”

Instant Articles was created to solve this problem. The format³⁵ shows the whole article on Facebook’s site, rather than directing the reader to the story within a mini-browser in the app.

推出Instant Articles服务就是用来解决这个问题的。这种模式在Facebook网站上显示出整篇文章，而不是将读者指引至应用中的一个迷你浏览器。

“Each second counts,” says Michael Reckhow, Facebook’s product manager for Instant Articles. “Speed is the most important feature you can deliver in a mobile experience.” Facebook has the tools to make the articles load up to 10 times faster by simplifying the complex network requests, which news publishers do not have, he says. The new format also allows for more photos and interactive³⁶ elements without reducing speed. “Facebook’s users?.?.?.?are sharing more and more links to news articles.”

“每一秒钟都很重要，”负责Instant Articles的Facebook产品经理迈克尔?雷克豪(Michael Reckhow)说，“在移动体验中，速度是你可以提供的最重要功能。”他说，Facebook有能力通过简化复杂的网络请求将文章的加载速度提升10倍，而新闻机构没有这样的能力。新的服务还可以在不降低速度的情况下承载更多照片和互动元素。“Facebook的用户……正在分享越来越多的新闻报道链接。”

Facebook has signed up nine publishers to Instant Articles; Apple has several dozen, ranging from The Economist, Politico and The Daily Telegraph to magazines such as GQ, Vanity Fair and Marie Claire. But not every publisher has jumped on board.

Facebook已经为Instant Articles签约了9家出版机构；而苹果已经签约了几十家，从《经济学人》、Politico、《每日电讯报》(Daily Telegraph)，到《智族》(GQ)、《名利场》(Vanity Fair)和《嘉人》(Marie Claire)等杂志。但并不是所有出版机构都愿意加盟。

News Corp, which owns a large newspaper portfolio, including the Wall Street Journal, The Sun and The Times, has not signed up to either scheme. Robert Thomson, News Corp’s chief executive, says the initiatives hark back to the “archaic³⁷ AOL-style walled garden” of the web 15 years ago.

旗下拥有《华尔街日报》、《太阳报》及《泰晤士报》(The Times)等多份报纸的新闻集团(News Corp)，并未与Facebook或苹果签约。新闻集团首席执行官罗伯特?汤姆森(Robert Thomson)称，这些倡议让人回想起15年前web上那种“过时的、美国在线(AOL)式的围墙花园”。

Providing content to these news services could be damaging to the identity of News Corp’s individual titles, he suggests. “Egregious³⁸ aggregation takes various forms and there is no perceptible purpose in allowing our identity and our yields to be drowned in a stream of content. Our journalism³⁹ is outstanding and has a commercial value, so why would we allow that immense value to be undermined in formats⁴⁰ that commodify content?”

新闻服务提供内容可能会损害新闻集团旗下报纸的独立认同。“过度聚合有各种各样的形式，而且看不出有什么目的要让我们的认同和收益被淹没在内容的洪流中。我们的新闻是卓越的、有商业价值的，那么，我们为什么要允许这样巨大的价值在使内容商品化的服务中被削弱呢？”

Yet for other publishers, the prospect⁴¹ of reaching younger audiences — readers that may not be inclined to ever shell out for a digital subscription — trumps⁴² any doubts. “If you think that these digital users are unlikely to become subscribers the fact that you can monetise them through advertising becomes a victory in itself,” says Mr Thompson of the New York Times.

然而，对其他出版商来说，接触到更年轻的受众——这些读者也许根本不打算掏钱进行数字订阅——这种前景胜过了一切疑虑。“如果你想到这些数字用户不太可能变成订阅用户，那么你可以通过广告从他们身上赚钱的事实本身就是一场胜利了，”《纽约时报》的汤普森说。

The services should allow publishers to offer another dimension to their ad sales packages, according to Mr Doctor of Newsonomics. “If you are the New York Times and you do a deal with Ford⁴³ and put together a $400,000 campaign for them you can put the ads on NYTimes.com, you can put them in your news apps and now you can put it next to New York Times stories on Facebook. There’s more distribution and a larger audience but [thanks to Facebook] that audience will be younger.”

他提出，向这些

Newsonomics的多克托表示，这些服务应当允许出版商为他们的广告销售套餐提供又一个维度。“如果你是《纽约时报》，和福特(Ford)达成了一项协议，为他们进行总值40万美元的广告宣传，你可以把广告放在NYTimes.com上，可以把广告放在你的新闻应用里，现在你还可以把广告放在Facebook里《纽约时报》的报道旁边。这样分发更广，受众群更大，不过（得益于Facebook）这些受众将更加年轻。”

Adding expertise⁴⁴

增添专业诀窍

But there are other lingering worries for publishers. Technology companies are doing more than merely being a conduit and platform for news and advertising. They are encroaching on to the territory of newspapers and magazines by becoming journalism practitioners⁴⁵, hiring people to make editorial judgments⁴⁶ about story selection and placement.

但出版商还有一些挥之不去的担忧。科技公司的活动已经超出了新闻、广告的渠道和平台的范畴。它们正逐渐侵入报纸和杂志的领地，雇佣人员对新闻报道的遴选和排版位置作出编辑选择，从而成为新闻从业者。

Apple recently began advertising for editors to work on Apple News, part of a push to offer the same kind of personalisation in news that it is striving for with its new Apple Music streaming service. A recent job ad said it sought journalists with “newsroom experience” able to “recognise original, compelling stories unlikely to be identified by algorithms”.

最近，苹果开始发布广告招募Apple News的编辑，就像苹果现在努力在新的Apple Music流媒体服务中做到的事情一样，此举部分是为了在新闻中体现出一种个性化。最近一则苹果招聘广告称，苹果希望寻找有“新闻编辑部经验”的记者，能够“识别出不太可能被算法发现的新颖和能够打动人的报道”。

Twitter, too, is hiring journalists. Its so-called Project Lightning, which is set to be launched in the autumn, will present the news that already floods the messaging platform in a way that makes it easier to find. The company is establishing its own editorial team to select the best 25 to 30 tweets on particular topics.

Twitter也在招募记者。今秋该公司将启动“Project Lightning”（闪电计划），把已经充斥在其消息平台上的新闻以一种更易找到的方式呈现出来。该公司正在成立自己的编辑团队，为特定话题挑选25到30条最佳tweet。

It is unclear how Facebook and Apple will set their own editorial policies: like Facebook, Apple has not yet clarified whether it would distribute stories about its own activities, for example. This raises important questions for publishers, says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism in New York.

目前还不清楚Facebook和苹果将如何设定自己的编辑政策：比如，就像Facebook一样，苹果还没有阐明它是否将分发有关该公司自身活动的报道。哥伦比亚大学(Columbia University)陶氏数字新闻中心(Tow Center for Digital Journalism)主任艾米丽?贝尔(Emily Bell)表示，这给发行商带来一些重要问题。

“Journalism has always had an independence of production and distribution,” she says. “But we’re moving away from that for the first time.” Publishers are “becoming dependent on a power structure they should be reporting on”.

“新闻一直都拥有制作和分发的独立性，”她表示，“但我们正第一次背离这一点。”出版商正“变得依赖于一个它们本应报道的权力结构。”

It all adds up to a Faustian bargain for an industry that has few other options, she says. “There’s nothing transparent⁴⁷ about these platforms. But you don’t have much of an option but to embrace them if you want to reach an audience and remain relevant.”

贝尔表示，这一切对一个没有多少其他选择的行业构成了一笔浮士德式的交易。“这些平台没有透明度可言。但你没有太多选择，要想触及受众，保持相关性，你就必须接受它们。”