Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.
Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in pubs and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters. 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.
Now, the news industry is returning to something closer to the coffee house. The Internet is news more participatory, social, diverse and partisan (党派的) ,reviving the loose ethos of the era before mass media. Ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing, filtering, discussing and distributing news through, like Twitter, Mobile-phone and some Social-networks.
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, which provides an anonymous way for whistle blowers to publish documents. The news agenda is no longer controlled by a few press barons and state outlets, like the BBC.
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. 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. Meantime, the Internet is breeding 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(尖锐的) , CNN and MSNBC, combined.
What is to be done At a social level, not much. But as producers of new journalism, they can be cautious with fact sand 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, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the age of the Internet. The coffee house is back. Enjoy it.
Questions 57 to 61 are based on the following passage.What accounts for the decline of amount and quality of local political report in the print press