VOA慢速英语2012 Technology Report - Website Saves Today's Headlines for the Future

 

Technology Report - Website Saves Today's Headlines for the Future

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

If researchers want to know what happened on a particular day, they often look at newspapers published on that day. But what would happen if newspapers were to stop publishing? Future researchers would likely turn to the Web.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine at Archive.org has for years saved, or archived, websites from the past. But it only does this once a day for news websites, and even less often for other websites.

Twenty-nine-year-old reporter Ben Welsh decided² to create a site similar to Archive.org. But he wanted to archive only news websites. And, he wanted to save their homepages more often.

Mr. Welsh works³ for the Los Angeles Times newspaper in California. In May he created PastPages.org. The website saves the homepages of seventy news websites from around the world once an hour. Mr. Welsh says this schedule of what he calls “harvesting” is important in today’s quickly-changing news environment.

BEN WELSH: “Because over the course of a day, the narrative⁴ arc¹ of a news story can develop quite a bit."

Mr. Welsh says nothing like PastPages.org had ever been done. He says no one had saved the homepages of so many news websites so often, and made that material available to the public. He hopes to keep adding to the site until it is archiving material from up to three hundred news websites around the world.

Ben Welsh spends about sixty dollars a month on storage space for PastPages.org. He feared the cost would increase beyond what he could afford, so he asked people for help through the website Kickstarter. Thousands of Americans use the website to seek money to pay for their projects.

Two days after Ben Welsh made his request, PastPages.org had received promises for half of the five thousand dollars that he had asked for. Within about a week, he had gotten all of it and more. Mr. Welsh says he will use the money to expand his website.

BEN WELSH: “Then my hope is, is on top of that to build some features specifically⁵ targeted to media researchers and media critics so that they’ll be able to more-easily access data like this to do an analysis of media coverage⁶.”

Stephanie Bluestein was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. She is now an assistant professor of journalism⁷ at California State University, Northridge. She believes PastPages.org will prove to be a valuable resource.

STEPHANIE BLUESTEIN: “Until now we haven’t had any archives that’s been to this frequency⁸. So now you could go back and look hour by hour and see the placement of what was the lead story, how the headline changed and how one newspaper played a story versus⁹ another one. Now you can actually compare.

Professor Bluestein says today’s news changes so quickly that even archiving once an hour may soon not be enough.

And that’s the VOA Special English Technology Report. I’m Christopher Cruise¹⁰.

1 arc   

n.弧形（物），弧，电弧，弧光

参考例句：

• The sun appears to move in an arc across the sky.太阳看起来在天空中以弧形运行。
• The rainbow described an arc in the dark sky.彩虹在昏暗的天空划出了一道圆弧。

2 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

3 works   

n.作品，著作；工厂，活动部件，机件

参考例句：

• We expect writers to produce more and better works.我们期望作家们写出更多更好的作品。
• The novel is regarded as one of the classic works.这篇小说被公认为是最优秀的作品之一。

4 narrative   

n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的

参考例句：

• He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
• Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

5 specifically   

adv.明确地，具体地；特别地，特意

参考例句：

• The book was written specifically for children.这本书是特地为儿童编写的。
• I told you specifically not to do that.我明确地告诉你不要那样做。

6 coverage   

n.报导，保险范围，保险额，范围，覆盖

参考例句：

• There's little coverage of foreign news in the newspaper.报纸上几乎没有国外新闻报道。
• This is an insurance policy with extensive coverage.这是一项承保范围广泛的保险。

7 journalism   

n.新闻工作，报业

参考例句：

• He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师，可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
• He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。

8 frequency   

n.次数，频率；经常发生，频繁

参考例句：

• If we can know their frequency we will monitor their talking.如果我们知道他们的频率,我们就能监听他们的谈话。
• The tanks broke down with increasing frequency.坦克越来越频繁地熄火。

9 versus   

prep.以…为对手，对；与…相比之下

参考例句：

• The big match tonight is England versus Spain.今晚的大赛是英格兰对西班牙。
• The most exciting game was Harvard versus Yale.最富紧张刺激的球赛是哈佛队对耶鲁队。

10 cruise   

v.巡航，航游，缓慢巡行；n.海上航游

参考例句：

• They went on a cruise to Tenerife.他们乘船去特纳利夫岛。
• She wants to cruise the canals of France in a barge.她想乘驳船游览法国的运河。