Read the following text to answer questions 63 to 65.
The BBC, Britain’s mammoth public-service broadcaster, has long1
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.4
That’s no longer the case. The Internet has brought the BBC and
newspapers in direct competition — and the BBC looks like coming
best.7
The success online of Britain’s lumbering 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. He10
launched the corporation’s online operations in 1998, saying that the BBC
would be a trusted guide for people bewildered by the variety of online
services.13
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 vast16
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-to-19
use 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 annoys22
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 troubles25
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 people28
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%.31
Adapted from “Old News and a New Contender”, The Economist, June 18th 2005, p. 27-8.