请翻译：
福建师范大学外国语学院  林明金 

A New Chapter 
  Tina Brown       
  Editor-in-chief of  The Daily Beast and Newsweek Sometimes, change isn’t j ust good, it’s necessary. 

The issue in your hand is the last edition of Newsweek in print. The next, in the first week of January, will be on your iPad or Kindle or phone. By late February, you will see the full evolution of the spanking-new, all-digital Newsweek Global, currently in development. 
It’s been a turbulent two-year journey, culminating in our decision to leave print and take the leap into a digital future. In 2010 the 92-year-old audio tycoon Sidney Harman bought a moribund Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. for a dollar in a quixotic bid to save a legendary magazine.                                        

Shortly after, the incurable old romantic asked The Daily Beast, the  news site I founded with Barry Diller’s IAC in 2008, for its hand in  marriage. And it’s been a blast.                                           

This is not a conventional magazine, or a hidebound place. It  is in that spirit that we’re making our latest, momentous  change, embracing a digital medium that all our competitors  will one day need to embrace with the same fervor. We are  ahead of the curve. A magazine that will soon turn 80 will now  be, when all the changes are unveiled in February, a vigorous  young publication all over again, taking its readers to territory  that is new and uncharted.                                          

One thing, however, will not change, and that is  our commitment to journalism of the very  highest quality. We would not be Newsweek if  it were otherwise. So as we say sayonara to  print, we thank our 1.5 million loyal readers,  and ask you to wish us luck and join us next  year in our all-digital future.
Are We Ready For the End of the Newspaper？                           

Fast-forward to the present and the entire news landscape is different. Services  like Facebook and Twitter dominate our lives -- kids and adults alike use both  services to get information about their favorite bands, celebrities, brands and  even politicians.                                              

New technologies make it easier than ever for anyone to make a  website and start writing about whatever they want, when they  want and how they want.                                  

Now to most that seems great, but what about getting the hard, cold facts? What if you  want the reassurance that what you're being told is accurate and isn't the fabrication of a  13-year-old playing around on his laptop?                                               

Your local newspaper is your answer.  Staffed by editors, reporters, printing  personnel and advertising reps, these  people make up the trusted institutions  that have delivered the news to us for more  than a century.                                           

Their livelihood is reporting and producing  the news and they hold themselves  accountable for the news they produce.  However, a tremor has hit our society,  threatening to throw off the balance in the  type of news we receive and how we get it.                                      

Traditionally, newspapers such as  the New York  Times and the Wall Street  Journal have been the gatekeepers of  information -- the people who decided the  issues that are most critical to the public  and require their attention. That no longer  holds true.                                         

In today’s day and age, all that is required is  a Twitter hashtag to get thousands of people  to stand together against corruption and  greed.                                      

Many are shifting their focus to the Web and forcing their reporters and  staff into the 24-hour news cycle. This is something usually reserved for  cable news networks. However, making a steady profit off the Web has  become increasingly hard. While online advertising helps to support these  media organizations, many have resorted to creating pay walls which  prevent you from viewing articles unless you're a paying subscriber. The  results are mixed at best.                                            

When thousands of websites offer you news for free, it'll be very hard  j ustifying the extra expense to a public already reeling in the face of  economic distress.                                          

Whether people realize it or not, we need  newspapers. They keep us informed and  they keep up us honest. They've uncovered  corruption, showed us miracles, helped  bring about change and helped protect  those who have lacked the means to  protect themselves.                                        

The pen is truly mightier than the sword.  We can't let it run out of ink.                                

The job of the newspeople is to explain what  makes news news—what makes news j ump  off the page or the screen, why it is not j ust  merely data. That news is, for better or  worse, a card trick. Holding people’s  attention is the trick.                                      

The news is technologically obsolete—information  envelops us, competing for our attention, hence fewer  and fewer people (read: younger people) feel any need  to seek it out. This has resulted in a rapidly aging  audience for all news media—the adult-diaper crowd— which is sending advertisers scurrying to find more  energetic buyers.                                     

And, if you do need to seek information, you  don’t browse for it anymore; you search for  it—the Google model. This precise targeting  of interest means many news advertisers  (sellers of autos, real estate, and various  classified services, for instance) now have  cheaper and better ways to sell.                                      

Yet here’s the irresistible notion: Every advance in  technology has seen the invention of a new form of  news. Linotype got us mass circulation of  newspapers 125 years ago; television, the  network evening news 60 years ago; cable, 24-7  satellite news 25 years ago. So what’s Internet  news—what’s the new news thing?                                      

Indeed, most of the people I know who are  interested in news, rather than, say, social  networking, or solitary blogging, who  believe news media might thrive, online or  in more classic forms, are old.                                    

Where is the journalism we need going to  come from now? Is the transition from newsprint to online  journalism, as the newspapermen assert, j ust a  platform change from one train to the next?                                    

The internet has changed all that. It is the first mass  medium in history with almost no barriers to entry  and practically unlimited content-carrying capacity.  These two factors have converged to create millions  of websites and blogs, and billions of web pages,  resulting in the collapse of online advertising rates  for all but highly specialist or unique websites.                                     

And that has created another dilemma you won’t  read about in the press – the commodification of  news. There’s news everywhere on the internet,  most of it free, so why would readers pay for an  old-style, all-purpose newspaper “bundle” on a  website when they can access content that is  often deeper and richer on niche sites?                                   

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we  need is journalism. For a century, the  imperatives to strengthen journalism and to  strengthen newspapers have been so tightly  wound as to be indistinguishable.                                     

What do you think is a way out for traditional news media in the  era of Internet?                                      

Do you think Internet provides an opportunity for media revolution?                                

To what extent do you agree or disagree that “society doesn’t  need newspaper. What we need is journalism”?