關注社會:英國一少年撰寫研究報告 驚動傳媒高管
【英文原文】
Research note by British ‘teenage scribbler' causes City sensation
摘要：一名15歲的男孩撰寫的研究報告，已成爲中年媒體高管和投資者的話題。當英國前財政大臣尼格爾•勞森(Nigel Lawson)將倫敦金融城分析師貶稱爲“少年文人”時，這名男孩還沒有出生。
A research note written by a 15-year-old, who was not born when former UK chancellor Nigel Lawson dismissed City analysts as “teenage scribblers”, has become the talk of middle-aged media executives and investors.
Morgan Stanley's European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank's interns from a London school, to describe his friends' media habits. His report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it,” said Edward Hill-Wood, head of the team.
The response was enormous. “We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day,” said Mr Hill-Wood, 35, estimating that the note had generated five or six times more feedback than the team's usual reports. However, he made no claims for its statistical rigour.
As elderly media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, to fawn over Twitter and fret over their business models, Mr Robson set out a sobering case that tomorrow's consumers are using more and more media but are unwilling to pay for it.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.
His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.
Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.
Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.
【中文譯文】
一名15歲的男孩撰寫的研究報告，已成爲中年媒體高管和投資者的話題。當英國前財政大臣尼格爾·勞森(Nigel Lawson)將倫敦金融城分析師貶稱爲“少年文人”時，這名男孩還沒有出生。
摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)歐洲媒體分析師請馬修·羅布森(Matthew Robson)描述他朋友的媒體閱讀習慣。羅布森是倫敦一所學校在摩根士丹利的實習生。團隊負責人愛德華•希爾-伍德(Edward Hill-Wood)表示，他的報告是“我們見過的最清晰、最發人深省的觀點之一。因此我們把它發表出來。”
報告引起的反響非常熱烈。35歲的希爾-伍德表示：“我們整天都收到數十位基金經理和數位首席執行官的電子郵件和電話。”他估計，該報告產生的反饋，是該團隊通常報告的五、六倍。不過，他並不擔保自己的統計結果非常嚴謹。
當年長的媒體大亨在愛達荷州太陽谷(Sun Valley)Allen & Co會議上對Twitter大加讚揚，並對自己的商業模式感到煩惱之際，羅布森提出了一個令人警醒的觀點：未來的消費者正在更多地使用媒體，但不願爲此付費。
羅布森表示：“青少年不使用Twitter。”他寫道，用手機更新這項微型博客服務，需要花費寶貴的儲值，而且“他們意識到，沒有人關注他們的檔案，因此他們的tweets毫無意義。”
羅布森的同齡人發現，很難找到時間定時看電視，同時與傳統的電臺廣播相比，他們更願意在等網站上收聽沒有廣告的音樂。即使在網上，青少年發現廣告“非常煩人，而且毫無意義”。
他們的時間和金錢都花在了電影、音樂會和視頻遊戲機上，他表示，視頻遊戲機也可用作聊天工具，其吸引力超過電話。
羅布森對苦苦掙扎的印刷媒體出版商沒有提供多少安慰。他稱，他認識的青少年中沒有人經常閱讀報紙，因爲多數人懶得看一頁又一頁的文字內容，而寧可在網上或電視上觀看內容提要。
【詞彙學習】
1. thought-provoking adj. 引起思考的，發人深省的
The bad news have a thought-provoking effect on all of us.
對我們大家來說，這個壞消息是發人深省的。
2. rigour n. 嚴格，嚴厲；嚴謹，嚴密
The academic rigour of his lectures is fortunately tempered with wit.
幸好他的講座學術上嚴謹，語言上妙趣橫生。
3. mogul n. 大人物；巨頭；大亨
The football captain was the mogul of the school.
那足球隊長是該校的大人物。
