How the News Got Less Mean
新闻何以不再那么负面
The most read article of all time on BuzzFeed contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips and no inflammatory ranting. It’s a series of photos called “21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity,” which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. At Upworthy too, hope is the major draw. “This kid just died. What he left behind is wondtacular,” an Upworthy post about a terminally ill teen singer, earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research.
新闻聚合网站BuzzFeed上有史以来阅读次数最多的一篇文章既没有女明星的露点照，也没有煽动性的呼号，而是一组照片，名为“21张照片让你重拾对人性的信念”。迄今为止，这组照片已经吸引了将近1400万次访问。Upworthy网站主打的也是希望牌。网站上一篇题为“那名孩子刚走了，留给我们一个了不起的奇迹”的帖文，讲述了一个病重少年歌手的事迹，在这个夏季被阅读了1500万次，募集了30多万美元的癌症研究基金。
The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing. Bloggers have traditionally turned to sarcasm and snark to draw attention. But the success of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, whose philosophies embrace the viral nature of upbeat stories, hints that the Web craves positivity.
吸引读者在线阅读的策略组合正在变化。博客作者惯于使用冷嘲热讽搏人眼球，但是BuzzFeed和Upworthy等网站倚托正能量故事的传播力取得成功的事实表明，网络亟需正能量。
The reason: social media. Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future.
原因就是媒体的社会性。研究人员发现，人们希望通过在线分享积极乐观的故事为自己塑造积极的形象。随着越来越多的人转投脸书和推特等社交网站了解时事，新闻报道要想赢得观众，或许需要采用更为积极乐观的基调。如果说社会性是媒体的未来，乐观的故事或许就是传媒企业的未来。
“When we started, the prevailing wisdom was that snark ruled the Internet,” says Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Upworthy. “And we just had a really different sense of what works.”
“刚上线那会儿，盛行的理论认为互联网是讽刺挖苦的天下，” Upworthy的联合创始人以利·帕里泽说，“可是，什么管用、什么不管用，我们的看法却完全不一样。”
“You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the corner — it’s the same for Twitter or Facebook,” he says. “Part of what we’re trying to do with Upworthy is give people the tools to express a conscientious, thoughtful and positive identity in social media.”、
“谁也不想成为派对上疯疯癫癫怒气冲冲躲在角落里大叫大嚷的那个人——推特和脸书也不想，”他说，“Upworthy所要做的一件事情，就是给人们提供各种工具，让他们在社会媒体上表达一个真实的、经过思考的、积极的身份。” And the science appears to support Pariser’s philosophy. In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that “up votes,” showing that a visitor liked a comment or story, begat more up votes on comments on the site, but “down votes” did not do the same. In fact, a single up vote increased the
likelihood that someone else would like a comment by 32%, whereas a down vote had no effect. People don’t want to support the cranky commenter, the critic or the troll. Nor do they want to be that negative personality online.
科学研究似乎印证了帕里泽的理念。麻省理工学院最近的一项研究显示，Upworthy网站上被“顶”——亦即表明网友喜欢某个评论或故事的方式——的评论或故事能够为站点带来更多的赞成人数，但是被“踩”的评论或故事却没有这种作用。实际上，每次“顶”都可以把他人参与评论的可能性提高32%，而“踩”就没有效果。人们不想去支持脾气暴躁的评论者、吹毛求疵的人或恶搞的人。也没有人愿意在网上留下拥有消极人格的形象。
In another study published in 2012, Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, monitored the most e-mailed stories produced by the New York Times for six months and found that positive stories were more likely to make the list than negative ones.
在20xx年发布的另一项研究中，《传染力：流行密码》一书的作者、宾州大学沃顿商学院营销学教授乔纳·伯杰监控了纽约时报六个月内被网民邮件转发推荐次数最多的新闻报道排行榜，发现积极的报道比消极的报道上榜几率更大。 “What we share [or like] is almost like the car we drive or the clothes we wear,” he says. “It says something about us to other people. So people would much rather be seen as a Positive Polly than a Debbie Downer.”
“我们分享（或喜欢）的东西，就想我们开的车和穿的衣服一样，”他说，“会向他人传达一些关于我们个人的信息。因此，人们宁愿被看作波利那样乐呵呵的傻大姐，而不愿被看作黛比唐纳式的丧气话大王。”
It’s not always that simple: Berger says that though positive pieces drew more
traffic than negative ones, within the categories of positive and negative stories, those articles that elicited more emotion always led to more shares.
事情并不总是如此简单。伯杰说，积极的报道虽然比消极的报道能够吸引更多的阅读量，但是单就这两类报道而言，能打动人的文章总能被更多分享。
“Take two negative emotions, for example: anger and sadness,” Berger says. “Both of those emotions would make the reader feel bad. But anger, a high arousal emotion, leads to more sharing, whereas sadness, a low arousal emotion, doesn’t. The same is true of the positive side: excitement and humor increase sharing, whereas contentment decreases sharing.”
“举个例子，愤怒和悲伤是两种消极的情感，”伯杰说，“都会让读者感觉不快。但是愤怒更能激起人的情感，因而涉及愤怒情感的文章，更容易被分享，而悲伤则不然。积极情感也是如此，激动和幽默会促进分享，而满足会减少分享。” And while some popular BuzzFeed posts — like the recent “Is this the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done?” — might do their best to elicit shares through anger, both BuzzFeed and Upworthy recognize that their main success lies in creating positive viral material.
BuzzFeed上有些流行的帖文——像最近的“这是福克斯新闻频道史上最囧的采访吗？”——广为分享或许是因为走了激起读者愤怒的路数。然而，BuzzFeed和Upworthy都认为，积极而富有传播力的内容才是此类帖文获得成功的主要原因。
“It’s not that people don’t share negative stories,” says Jack Shepherd, editorial director at BuzzFeed. “It just means that there’s a higher potential for positive stories to do well.”
BuzzFeed社论主管杰克·谢泼德说，“不是说人们不分享消极的故事，而是积极的故事被分享的可能性更大。”
Upworthy’s mission is to highlight serious issues but in a hopeful way, encouraging readers to donate money, join organizations and take action. The strategy seems to be working: barely two years after its launch date (in March 2012), the site now boasts 30 million unique visitors per month, according to Upworthy. The site’s average monthly unique visitors grew to 14 million people over its first six quarters — to put that in perspective, the Huffington Post had only about 2 million visitors in its first six quarters online.
Upworthy的使命是突出重大事件，但是要以一种让人充满希望的方式实现，以此鼓励读者捐赠、加入某些组织或行动起来。这一策略似乎起了作用，据Upworthy称，上线还不到两年（指截止原文创作时期，Upworthy是20xx年3
月上线的），网站每月的独立访客已经达到3000万。站点上线后的前六个季度，月均独立访客已经达到1400万。要知道，哈芬顿邮报上线前六个季度，独立访客才200万。
But Upworthy measures the success of a story not just by hits. The creators of the site only consider a post a success if it’s also shared frequently on social media. “We are interested in content that people want to share partly for pragmatic reasons,” Pariser says. “If you don’t have a good theory about how to appear in Facebook and Twitter, then you may disappear.”
但是，点击次数并不是Upworthy衡量一个故事成功与否的唯一标准。网站创始人认为，成功的帖子还需要频频在社交媒体上被分享。帕雷泽说“对于那些出于实用原因被人分享的内容，我们很感兴趣。在脸书或推特上所造自己的形象没有一套，你就会消失。”
Nobody has mastered the ability to make a story go viral like BuzzFeed. The site, which began in 2006 as a lab to figure out what people share online, has used what it’s learned to draw 60 million monthly unique visitors, according to BuzzFeed. (Most of that traffic comes from social-networking sites, driving readers toward BuzzFeed’s mix of cute animal photos and hard news.) By comparison the New York Times website, one of the most popular newspaper sites on the Web, courts only 29 million unique visitors each month, according to the Times.
BuzzFeed已经掌握了让故事疯狂传播的技能。BuzzFeed源自20xx年发起的一个研究人们在线分享习惯的实验室，并以此发迹，现在每月独立访客超过6000万。（大多数访问流量来自社交网络，读者更喜欢BuzzFeed网站上因可爱动物照片点缀而不再干巴巴的新闻）。相比之下，根据《纽约时报》的数据，纽约时报网站这个互联网上最受欢迎的新闻站点，每月吸引的独立访客也就2900万人。 BuzzFeed editors have found that people do still read negative or critical stories, they just aren’t the posts they share with their friends. And those shareable posts are the ones that newsrooms increasingly prize.
BuzzFeed的编辑发现，人们仍然会阅读消极的或批判性的故事，只是不会与朋友分分享而已。而且，被人分享的帖文也越来越受到传统新闻媒体的重视。 “Anecdotally, I can tell you people are just as likely to click on negative stories as they are to click on positive ones,” says Shepherd. “But they’re more likely to share positive stories. What you’re interested in is different from what you want your friends to see what you’re interested in.”
“顺便说一句，虽说人们点击消极故事和积极故事的可能性一样大，”谢泼德说，“但是积极的故事更有可能被分享。你感兴趣的东西和你想让朋友认为你感兴趣的东西，是不一样的。”
So as newsrooms re-evaluate how they can draw readers and elicit more shares on Twitter and Facebook, they may look to BuzzFeed’s and Upworthy’s happiness model for direction.
因此，传统媒体在重新评估如何吸引读者并让他们在推特和脸书上分享自己的故事时，或许可以向BuzzFeed和Upworthy的幸福模式看齐，以找准方向。 “I think that the Web is only becoming more social,” Shepherd says. “We’re at a point where readers are your publishers. If news sites aren’t thinking about what it would mean for someone to share a story on social media, that could be detrimental.” “ 我认为，网络的社会性只会加强，”谢泼德说，“我们现在处于读者即出版商的时代。新闻站点再不想想在社会媒体上分享故事意味着什么，后果也许是灾难性的。