来源：《卫报》
刊登日期：2021年4月18日
Recent decades have been punishing for local and regional as well as national print media, as digital competitors led by Facebook and Google have sucked up advertising and audiences. Last year, the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan published a book, Ghosting the News, examining the decline of local reporting in the US, and arguing that the disappearance of trusted information sources is linked to the decline of democracy. Even “citizens’ ability to have a common sense of reality and facts”, she suggested, is endangered when the closure of thousands of titles is accompanied by Trumpian rhetoric about “fake news”.
近几十年来，随着以Facebook和谷歌为首的互联网竞争对手吸收了广告和受众，地方和全国性的印刷媒体都受到了打击。去年，《华盛顿邮报》的玛格丽特•沙利文出版了一本书《消失的新闻》，探讨了美国地方报道的衰落，并认为可信信息来源的消失与民主的衰落有关。她表示，当数千家报纸停刊之际，特朗普式的关于“假新闻”的说辞出现时，就连“公民判断真实和事实的常识能力”也受到了威胁。
The BBC’s local democracy reporting service was set up to fill the gap created when British local and regional press owners closed titles and shed jobs. The 150 BBC-funded reporters make a valuable contribution, and not all media businesses take the same approach to cutting costs. DC Thomson in Scotland, for example, is seen as having taken a longer-term view than some of its intensely profit-focused competitors. But the direction of travel is overwhelmingly down, with the pandemic acting as an accelerator. Last month, Reach, owner of the Daily Mirror and hundreds of regional titles, announced that it would close offices in places including Leicester, Stoke and Derby and rely on remote working.
英国广播公司（BBC）的地方民主报道服务的成立，是为了填补英国地方报业持有者关闭报社、裁剪工作时所造成的空白。这150名BBC资助的记者做出了宝贵的贡献，并不是所有的媒体企业都采取同样的方式削减成本。例如，人们认为，苏格兰的DC汤姆森比其一些高度关注利润的竞争对手着眼于长远。但是，由于新冠大流行起到了加速作用，事情的发展方向是压倒性的不利。上个月，拥有《每日镜报》和数百家地区报纸的Reach宣布，将关闭莱斯特(Leicester)、斯托克(Stoke)和德比(Derby)等地的办公室，转而依靠远程办公。
In the US, philanthropic donations are helping to support some news initiatives and their role as protectors of civic space. These developments do not, however, amount to a solution. News reporting cannot be left to clusters of sparky campaigners, Facebook groups or private donors.
在美国，慈善捐款有助于支持一些新闻活动以及它们作为公民空间保护者的作用。然而，这些发展并不能解决问题。不能把新闻报道留给一群活跃的活动家、Facebook群组或私人捐赠者。