第二十六届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛原文英译汉竞赛原文：How the News Got Less MeanThe most read article of all time on BuzzFeed contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips and no inflammatory ranting. Ifs a series of photos called 21 pictures that will restore your fait h 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.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.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 whafs 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 medias future.“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.”“You dont want to be that guy at the party whos crazy and angry and ranting in the corner its the same for Twitter or Facebook,” he says. Part of what were trying to do with Upworthy is give people the tools to express a conscientious, thoughtful and positive identity in social media.”And the science appears to support Parisers 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 dont want to support the cranky commenter, the critic or the troll. Nor do they want to be that negative personality online.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.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.”Its 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.“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 a rousal emotion, doesnt. The same is true of the positive side: excitement and humor increase sharing, whereas contentment decreases sharing.”And while some popular BuzzFeed posts like the recent “Is this the most embarrassing interview Fox News ha s ever done?” 一 might do their best to elicit shares through anger, both BuzzFeed and Upworthy recognize that their main success lies in creating positive viral material.“Its not that people dont share negative stories,” says Jack Shepherd, editori al director at BuzzFeed. “It just means that theres a higher potential for positive stories to do well.”Upworthys 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 sites 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.But Upworthy measures the success of a story not just by hits. The creators of the site only consider a post a success if its also shared frequently on social media. “We are interested in content that people want to share partly for pragmatic reasons,” Pariser says. “If you dont have a good theory about how to appear in Facebook and Twitter, then you may disappear.”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 its learned to draw 60 million