時代雜誌前執行主編WALTER ISAACSON：如何拯救你的報紙

這位大佬的建議很簡單，就是要讓讀者付費，不能再把讀者當大爺免費供養了。如果免費下去，就不會有人再提供新聞產品。我們也是人，要活下去。因此，把每條新聞都拿來賣。是啊，我們要製造暢銷的產品，而不是免費的垃圾。不然，看新聞的人多了，做新聞的死了。

原題：How to Save Your Newspaper

WALTER ISAACSON，CNN前董事長CEO和時代雜誌前執行主編 （圖左）
本文為時代雜誌最新封面文章

During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula "morally abhorrent" and also "economically self-defeating." That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr. Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off the hangman.
One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content.
One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written," he railed. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?"
The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting. (Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their explanation.)
But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or mental transaction costs.
But things have changed. "With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself," wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy. Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.
The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen journalism that is of value to their community.
When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase. Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report in Rwanda under such a system.
I say this not because I am "evil," which is the description my daughter slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps. Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

Isaacson, a former managing editor of TIME, is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe.

紐約時報：四川大地震可能與大壩有關聯

When the major earthquake struck last May, it originated 3.4 miles from the reservoir. The rupture in the Earth’s crust stretched for 185 miles, initially moving in a direction that Mr. Klose said was consistent with the pressure from the water’s weight

原題：Possible Link Between Dam and China Quake

By SHARON LAFRANIERE，Published: February 5, 2009，紐約時報

BEIJING — Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line.
A Columbia University scientist who studied the quake has said that it may have been triggered by the weight of 320 million tons of water in the Zipingpu Reservoir less than a mile from a well-known major fault. His conclusions, presented to the American Geophysical Union in December, coincide with a new finding by Chinese geophysicists that the dam caused significant seismic changes before the earthquake.
Scientists emphasize that the link between the dam and the failure of the fault has not been conclusively proved, and that even if the dam acted as a trigger, it would only have hastened a quake that would have occurred at some point.
Nonetheless, any suggestion that a government project played a role in one of the biggest natural disasters in recent Chinese history is likely to be politically explosive.
The issue of government accountability and responsiveness has boiled over in China in the past year. The grieving parents of thousands of schoolchildren killed in the disaster have already made the 7.9-magnitude earthquake a political issue, charging that children died needlessly in unsafe school buildings approved by negligent or corrupt officials.
More public anger erupted last year when the government failed to prevent the sale of tainted milk powder that sickened nearly 300,000 children and killed six.
“Any kind of government-related disaster presently is very, very damaging and politically extremely sensitive,” said Cheng Li, the China research director at the Brookings Institution.
If it is proved that the earthquake “was related to a man-made situation and not just a natural disaster, the government will be very uncomfortable with that kind of report because of the whole issue of government accountability,” Mr. Li said.
Questions about the Zipingpu Dam are especially delicate because China is building many major hydroelectric dams in the southwest, a region which has abundant water resources but is considered prone to earthquakes.
In a petition to the government in July, a group of environmentalists and scholars said the fact that government scientists had underestimated the risk of the May earthquake raised questions about a host of other dams built in the same valley and along five other major rivers, according to an article published by Probe International, an environmental advocacy group. Chinese authorities have steadfastly dismissed any notion that reservoir-building in Sichuan Province placed citizens at any added risk, and they have blocked some Web sites of environmental groups that suggest that dangers have been overlooked.
In a December article in the Chinese magazine Science Times, two scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences strongly denied that the dam played any role in the earthquake. “The earthquake research community outside and inside China has widely accepted the notion that the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake was a huge natural disaster caused by massive crustal movement, because no reservoir triggered-quake with a magnitude eight has ever occurred in history,” said Pan Jiazheng, an expert in hydroengineering, according to a translation published by Probe International.
Scientists generally agree that a reservoir, no matter how big, cannot by itself cause an earthquake. But Leonardo Seeber, a senior scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, said the impact of so much water could hasten an earthquake’s occurrence if geological conditions for a quake already existed. He said the best known example was a 1967 earthquake triggered by the Koyna Dam in a remote area of India, with a magnitude of about 6.5 and a death toll of about 180 people.
Mr. Seeber said that while the link between the Sichuan earthquake and the Zipingpu Dam was not yet proved, work by Christian Klose, a Columbia University researcher specializing in geophysical hazards, suggested the stress caused by the water’s weight might have hastened the quake by a few hundred years.
“It would have occurred anyway,” Mr. Seeber said. “But of course the people who were affected might think the timing is an important difference.”
Mr. Klose estimated that the weight of the water in the Zipingpu reservoir amounted to 25 times the natural stress that tectonic movements exert in a year. The added pressure, he wrote in an abstract to an unpublished study, “resulted in the Beichaun fault coming close to failure.”
Fifty stories tall and big enough to hold more than one billion cubic meters of water, the Zipingpu Dam astride the Minjiang River was billed as one of China’s biggest water control projects.
Officials said the $750 million project, part of a grand plan to develop regions in China’s south and west, would generate 760,000 kilowatts of electricity, irrigate more farmland, help control flooding and provide more water to industries and residents of nearby Chengdu, a city of more than 10 million.
Almost as soon as construction got under way in 2001, one expert, Li Youcai, voiced fears that officials were underplaying the risk of a major earthquake in the region, but government officials rejected his argument, according to an article published last year on China Dialogue, a Web site devoted to environmental news.
Officials allowed the reservoir to fill with water in late 2004. Fan Xiao, a chief engineer with the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, said that from late 2004 to late 2005, the data showed 730 minor earthquakes, with magnitudes of 3 or less.
When the major earthquake struck last May, it originated 3.4 miles from the reservoir. The rupture in the Earth’s crust stretched for 185 miles, initially moving in a direction that Mr. Klose said was consistent with the pressure from the water’s weight.
Mr. Fan, the chief engineer for the regional geology investigation team, told reporters soon afterward that he believed that the reservoir influenced the timing, magnitude and location of the earthquake.
“The main lesson is that in building these kinds of projects we need to give more consideration to scientific planning and not simply consider the electricity or water or the economic interests,” Mr. Fan said.
The debate reignited in December when two scientists with the China Earthquake Administration and three other researchers published a study in the Chinese journal Seismology and Geology. They concluded only that the weight of the reservoir’s water and diffusion of water from the reservoir below the Earth’s surface “clearly affected the local seismicity” over a period of nearly four years before the fault ruptured.
The Chinese researchers called for further study to see whether the reservoir helped trigger the earthquake. One of them, Du Fang, with the Sichuan Earthquake Administration, said Thursday that it was impossible to know whether the reservoir influenced the earthquake without more research. “The possibility exists,” she said.
Ms. Du said she and other scientists were free to research the issue fully. “We scientists are free to research the topic we proposed, as long as it is worth studying,” she said. “I don’t feel any restrictions on access to the data from the government.”

新聞集團二季度虧損64億美元 下調09年利潤預期

Kathy Shwiff / Nat Worden，華爾街日報

新聞集團(News Corp.)第二財政季度出現淨虧損，因該公司計入84億美元的商譽沖減；儘管該公司旗下有線網路業務利潤增長27%，但其他業務部門利潤普遍走低。
在截至去年12月31日的第二財季中，新聞集團淨虧損64.2億美元，合每股虧損2.45美元，上年同期淨利潤為8.32億美元，合每股收益27美分。不計商譽沖減，當季每股收益為12美分。
該公司當季收入下降8.4%，至78.7億美元。
接受湯森路透(Thomson Reuters)調查的分析師們預計，該公司當季每股收益為19美分，收入為83.9億美元。
新聞集團同時下調了2009財政年度的營運利潤預期。首席財務長David Devoe表示，公司現在預計2009財年經營利潤將較2008財年調整後的51.3億美元下降30%。
新聞集團去年11月份曾預計2009財年營運利潤減少10%-14%。Devoe說，自那以後，經濟形勢和消費者信心都顯著惡化，對該集團的直接影響就是所有以廣告為驅動力的業務都更加疲軟，其中包括本地電視臺、報紙和Fox Interactive，另外福克斯廣播網也受到影響，但程度相對較輕。

我的維多利亞公園

大概4個月前，第一次去了香港。太平山，銅鑼灣，會展中心，維多利亞港，等等，都沒有震撼我。但是，維多利亞公園卻讓我拍攝了最多圖像。東南亞打工群週末在公園裏聚會，遊玩，所彰顯的包容，是上海、北京多無法比擬的。國際化並不是讓殖民地標誌建築熠熠生輝或者在殖民地建築隔江修建現代新城區。你也會在上海街頭遇到許多洋人。可是，如果一座城市，對普通人沒有張開臂膀，她還是深入骨髓的狹隘。東南亞，除了讓你想到美麗海景房，以及美食，還有豪華賭場之外，還會讓你想到恐怖襲擊，想到戰亂，種族衝突。維多利亞公園那些美麗的姑娘，就像行走在自己的國家一樣閒適。她們圍繞在速食，席地而坐，歡聲笑語。她們在中國亭台佈景前拍照留念。旁邊還有便宜的服飾叫賣。廣場中央，還有樂隊高盛歌唱，背後就是“上帝萬能”幾個漢字在高大樓宇屹立。香港員警守衛在門口，可是他們並不打擾這些打工者。他們不像是監視，更像是保護。
維琪百科如此表述：“維多利亞公園於1954年8月開始興建，是戰後首個大型填海工程，該園前身為銅鑼灣避風塘，填海用物料是戰後拆樓所得之建築廢料，並於1957年10月落成啟用。公園建成後避風塘西遷至奇力島對出的海面。
維琪還特別解釋說：“維多利亞公園正門有一個維多利亞女皇銅像。此銅像是為紀念女皇於1897年登基六十周年而鑄造，原先放置於中環皇后像廣場，日本侵佔香港期間曾被運送至日本，準備熔化作為軍事材料，尚未動工日本已宣佈投降。戰後才歸還予香港政府，被安放到新建成的維多利亞公園，置於正門一帶的一個七呎高的基座。
“1997年來自中國大陸的行為藝術家潘星磊用鐵鎚打歪銅像的鼻子和向銅像潑上紅色油漆而被控刑事毀壞。”
順便說一句，維琪才告訴我“此場地全面禁煙”。可是，我好像在公園裏一邊拍照，一邊吸煙。
實際上，不止是在這裏，從銅鑼灣到中環的途中，樓宇之間的廊橋上，都聚集了大量東南亞人休息。在我的思維裏，他們應該是逃難者。可是，當我行走在他們中間，聽到他們的歡笑，感到他們不是逃難，而是幸福地生活在香港。
而今天，我在上海的地鐵上看到有趣的一幕。一位打扮正派，提公事包的中年男人，喝斥一位提攜巨大行囊的男子，很顯然，他以為行囊就代表外地人。結果後者用熟悉的上海腔回應。他們都是上海人。前幾日夜間乘車回家，一車人大多是外地客。他們除了帶有大量行囊。不同的是，他們臉上充滿滄桑，他們的眼神在窗外搜索這個城市的訊息。這種遊離，讓我感到，他們，才是真正的難民。他們逃離故土，然後在這裏受到喝斥。
上海有這麼多的公園，可是，你看到的，都是老者在散步，打牌。許多人大概還記得，奧運期間，北京劃定的特別區域。公園本來就是公共區域，是自由地。維多利亞公園紀念過許多事。我一輩子，都會記得，維多利亞公園旁邊那位女警的微笑。

孤立

“如果一個國家既不忍受勞工的移民輸入，也不容忍由國外廉價勞工生產的商品，那麼它就是在走向完全的經濟孤立。”——路德維希·馮·米塞斯《貨幣、方法與市場過程》