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  3. Printing industry that has made fat profits for years is struggling. Plunging circulation has forced many newspapers and magazin

Printing industry that has made fat profits for years is struggling. Plunging circulation has forced many newspapers and magazin

admin2013-09-26  43
问题     Printing industry that has made fat profits for years is struggling. Plunging circulation has forced many newspapers and magazines to shut. Survivors are seeing readers increasingly choose screen over inky paper, so media companies are printing fewer and slimmer physical copies. Rising online sales and unstable economies mean that retailers are not ordering catalogues and marketing material as they once did. The rising cost of paper has not helped.
    Shrinking demand has put large printers such as Schlott Group in Germany out of business. Survivors have little pricing power in a fragmented industry: in America the top 400 printers have less than 30% of the market, according to Ibis World, a research firm. Some say printing firms can now charge only around half what they did five years ago.
    If journalists are gloomy about the outlook for their industry, printers are depressed. Media companies can still make some money as readers switch to digital editions; a printer cannot. The outlook for newspaper printers is particularly grim, says Robert Picard, a media economist: advertisers are now keener to run their ads in magazines on high-quality glossy paper(光面纸)than in newspapers, whose circulation is shrinking. But newspapers and magazines require different printing equipment, so switching over is costly.
    Some printers are offering marketers and retailers the option of printing more personalised catalogues to target different groups of consumers more accurately. But this is not as profitable as " long runs" , printer-speak for running off hundreds of thousands of identical copies. Several printers have opened their presses to competitors to earn extra money; last year the newspaper group won a contract to print the Evening Standard, a London daily. A few reckon that they can turn a profit from the digital switch, and help clients to design electronic versions of their printed material.
    Others are branching out into new businesses. " We know there’s a freight train coming towards us," says Tom Quinlan, the boss of RR Donnelley, a large American printer. Over the past 18 months the firm has bought nine companies including an online self-publishing site, a financial-data firm and one with a technology that newspapers can license for an online-payment system. If you can’t print them, join them.
Printers cannot charge much as that of five years ago, because shrinking demand has weakened their______.
选项
答案pricing power
解析 本题考查纸质媒介的需求减少给印刷业带来的利益影响。文章第二段第一句指出，纸质媒介需求减少迫使很多大型印刷公司破产。第二句就接着指出幸存的一些公司基本已经没有定价的能力。题干中的weakened与原文中的little是同义转述，故本题答案为pricing power。
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