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  3. For years, digital news conformed to one section of the 1984 prophecy of the technology guru Stewart Brand — that "information w

For years, digital news conformed to one section of the 1984 prophecy of the technology guru Stewart Brand — that "information w

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问题     For years, digital news conformed to one section of the 1984 prophecy of the technology guru Stewart Brand — that "information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower. " Now, it is relying on his other, lesser-known maxim — that "information wants to be expensive because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. "
    As paywalls go up, and advertising yields continue to fall, publishers have pinned their hopes on subscriptions. Some suggest that it is a breach of publishers’ moral obligation to make news freely accessible because it is a public good.
    I don’t see why publishers have an ethical duty not to charge for the content they originate. Free news is a recent phenomenon. Newspaper publishers always charged readers, albeit a small amount compared with the cost of newsgathering. Furthermore, nothing will change the fact that people have access to far more information than before the internet. News cannot be patented - once information is uncovered, it spreads rapidly across Twitter and Facebook, and is repeated by rivals and aggregators.
    Yet the trend is clear. Most of the top US newspapers have a paywall in place, or are planning one. The financial model for print newspapers — that most revenues came from advertising, with subscriptions and news-stand prices making up the rest — does not work online. The double-digit increase in online advertising revenues in the early 2000s has slowed to the low single figures, as growing traffic is mostly offset by falling advertising yields. With hindsight, it is blindingly obvious that when the space for advertising expands — as it did hugely with the shift from print to online — prices fall. For a long time, this evaded news publishers, who lived in the vain hope that they could rely more on advertising in the online world, rather than less. Papers such as the FT and the New York Times have reversed that tactic — the NYT’s circulation revenues now exceed those from advertising. Thus, news is increasingly being paid for by affluent individuals — the average household income of NYT subscribers is about $100, 000— or produced as part of a corporate service, such as Bloomberg News and Thomson Reuters.
    Should we be worried? The risk is that news will become slanted in the interests of corporations and the wealthy. So far, there isn’t much sign of that. The news organisations best placed to prosper from the shift — Bloomberg, Reuters, the FT, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist — have high standards. Indeed, the shift towards subscriptions could raise editorial standards, rather than lowering them. Free sites that need to boost page views to gain advertising have an incentive to go downmarket with more gossip and celebrity news; the ones that rely more on subscriptions have the reverse incentive.
    But the fading era of advertising-subsidised newspapers and free-to-air television was at least democratic. At relatively low cost, everyone could be well informed. In the future, the information superhighway will have both fast and slow lanes.
A possible effect of news subscription is that .
选项 A、paid news will bias towards the rich
B、paid news will be of higher quality
C、free news will lose their market share
D、free news will be improved in their taste
答案B
解析 第五段指出，网络新闻转变为付费订阅可提高编辑水平；因为免费新闻网站需要提高访问量以便拉广告，这使它们具有走向“低端市场”的动机，靠八卦新闻博人眼球，而依靠付费订阅来盈利的网站，则与之相反。可见，付费订阅有可能提高新闻质量，[B]选项正确。
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