Enunciados de questões e informações de concursos
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The BBC, Britain’s mammoth(a) public-service broadcaster, has long been a cause for complaint among its competitors in television, radio and educational and magazine publishing. Newspapers, meanwhile, have been protected from it because they published in a different medium.
That’s no longer the case. The Internet has brought the BBC and newspapers in direct competition — and the BBC looks like coming _________ best.
The success online of Britain’s lumbering(b) giant of a public-service broadcaster is largely down to John Birt, a former director-general who “got” the Internet before any of the other big men of British media. He launched the corporation’s online operations in 1998, saying that the BBC would be a trusted guide for people bewildered(c) by the variety of online services.
The BBC now has 525 sites. It spends £15m ($ 27m) a year on its news website and another £51m on others ranging from society and culture to science, nature and entertainment. But behind the websites are the vast newsgathering and programme-making resources, including over 5,000 journalists, funded by its annual £2.8 billion public subsidy.
For this year’s election, the news website offered a wealth of easy-touse statistical detail on constituencies, voting patterns and polls. This week the BBC announced free downloads of several Beethoven symphonies performed by one of its five in-house orchestras. That particularly annoys(d) newspapers, whose online sites sometimes offer free music downloads — but they have to pay the music industry for them.
It is the success of the BBC’s news website that most troubles newspapers. Newspapers need to build up their online businesses because their offline businesses are flagging. Total newspaper readership has fallen by about 30% since 1990 and readers are getting older as young people increasingly get their news from other sources — principally the Internet. In 1990, 38% of newspaper readers were under 35. By 2002, the figure had dropped to 31%.
Adapted from “Old News and a New Contender”, The Economist, June 18th 2005, p. 27-8.
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Outras questões do mesmo concurso: IRBr / Diplomata / 2006
