①Whatever happened to the death of newspapers? A year ago the end seemed near. The recession threatened to remove the advertising and readers that had not already fled to the internet. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle were chronicling their own doom. America’s Federal Trade Commission launched a round of talks about how to save newspapers. Should they become charitable corporations? Should the state subsidize them? It will hold another meeting soon. But the discussions now seem out of date.
journalists
reported little
about these areas (原词复现,但无中生有)②In much of the world there is little sign of crisis. German and Brazilian papers have shrugged off the recession. Even American newspapers, which inhabit the most troubled corner of the global industry, have not only survived but often returned to profit. Not the 20% profit margins that were routine a few years ago, but profit all the same.
③It has not been much fun. Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. Readers are paying more for slimmer products. Some papers even had the nerve to refuse delivery to distant suburbs. Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists
, they can be pushed further
.
部分
对比,可推断出)④Newspapers are becoming more balanced businesses, with a healthier mix of revenues from readers
and advertisers. American papers have long been highly unusual in their reliance on ads. Fully 87% of their revenues came from advertising in 2008
, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD). In Japan the proportion is 35%
. Not surprisingly, Japanese newspapers are much more stable.
⑤The whirlwind that swept through newsrooms harmed everybody, but much of the damage has been concentrated in areas where newspaper are least distinctive. Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely cut off. Newspapers are less complete as a result. But completeness is no longer a virtue in the newspaper business.
supporters(对应cheerleader)
begin to feel concerned(对应talk of)(同义替换)
①Will the European Union make it? The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project’s greatest cheerleaders talk of
a continent facing a “Bermuda triangle” of debt, population decline and lower growth.
②As well as those chronic problems, the EU faces an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone’s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which (非限定定语从句)denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation.
③Yet(转折后面句子更重要) the debate about how to save Europe’s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone’s dominant powers, France and Germany, agree on the need for greater harmonization within the euro zone, but(转折后面句子更重要) disagree about what to harmonies.
④Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrowing, spending and competitiveness, backed by支持 quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country’s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economic co-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom 非限制定语从句there is a small majority for free-market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone单独从内部核心, Germany fears, a small majority favour French interference.
⑤A “southern” camp headed by French wants something different: “European economic government”
within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Euro bonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the France government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonization: e.g. curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs.
⑥It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world’s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.
①The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing—Amazon亚马逊 has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5 bn. but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all非限制定语从句. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users’ friendships and social lives.
②Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops of owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.
③(1)Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too.(2) Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them—and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.
④The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.