一夜成名的实习生

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一夜成名的实习生

作者：英国《金融时报》安德鲁?埃奇克利夫-约翰逊(andrew edgecliffe-johnson) 2009-07-24

上周，从Huffington Post到《印度教徒报》(The Hindu)，到处都在研究马修?罗布森(Matthew Robson)的观点。他被写进博客、上了Twitter，在世界各地的董事会会议室和投资办公室受到热议。一些小报记者出钱购买他的故事。一位15岁零7个月的少年能做到这样，可谓相当不错。罗布森从7月11日开始放暑假。

两周前，罗布森很高兴地成为了前往摩根士丹利(Morgan Stanley)金丝雀码头(Canary Wharf)办公室实习的6名伦敦学生中的一员。

这类职位通常会留给人脉广泛的银行家的朋友和家人。罗布森的人脉是由他的惠比特犬鲁迪(Rudy)帮他建立的：鲁迪拖着罗布森的母亲，与同在格林威治公园遛狗的摩根士丹利某媒体分析师的妻子相遇，两人由此攀谈了起来。

接受了高级职员为期一周的培训，契布鲁克综合学校的学生罗布森感到自己已经掌握了银行业的基本情况，期望能调到欧洲媒体研究部门。

青少年的实习期，大多是在取星巴克(Starbucks)订单和被忽视中度过的。但罗布森撞上了大运：团队负责人爱德华?希尔-伍德(Edward Hill-Wood)要他花几天时间统计一下朋友们使用媒体和通讯设备的习惯。希尔-伍德决定发表罗布森交上来的长达3页的报告，令这位15岁的少年成为自莫尼卡?莱温斯基(Monica Lewinsky)以来全世界最出名的实习生。

这份报告让摩根士丹利的客户难以接受。罗布森的同龄人认为，广告——身陷困境的媒体业日渐凝固的活力源泉——“非常烦人，而且毫无意义”。他们“懒得”读报纸、从不买CD或使用黄页指南，除了音乐会和电影票，他们一般会尽量不为其他任何东西付钱。

尽管手机对他们的社交生活至关重要，但他（通过短信）调查的朋友会避免购买昂贵的手机（害怕遗失）；拒绝使用移动网络（费用太高）；更喜欢用游戏机免费聊天。

罗布森对讨厌为娱乐和通讯埋单的一代人的平静描述，勾画出一幅不祥的图景。似乎是为了给中年人对世界运行方式的看法予以最后一击，他补充表示，“青少年不使用Twitter”，因为用手机更新这个微博客现象会用光储值，而储值用来给朋友们发短信会更好。

这份报告立即在全球激起了空前反响。上周一英国《金融时报》头版刊登相关报道后，这位不用Twitter的少年变成了数百篇报纸文章、无数博客日志和数千条tweet信息的主题。

希尔-伍德表示：“在我们曾参与的研究报告中，这篇报告激起的反应无疑最大，而且肯定会成为摩根士丹利发表过的、阅读人数最多的报告之一。”他已经放弃计算如潮水般涌入的电话和电子邮件的数量。

由于父母买了成抱的报纸，老师们把文章打印出来拿到班级上讨论，罗布森上周五表示：“我把我的名字输入谷歌(Google)，看看有多少文章中提到了我的名字。”

“我收到一封来自比利时堂兄的电子邮件，告诉我我的名字上了比利时的报纸；澳大利亚的叔叔接着发来一封电子邮件，说澳大利亚的报纸上也有。真是疯狂啊。”

博客圈可以表现得很无情，许多评论者就罗布森的结论展开了争论，或对他的背景提出了质疑。

如果重新来过，罗布森可能会添加一些关于杂志和书的内容，并介绍一下自己。他指出：“其中有些评论说，‘我打赌，他肯定是在一家非常高档的私立学校读书，爸爸是摩根士丹利的老总'。”

一些高管看到罗布森的报告后，对于孩子可能会告诉自己的内容感到吃惊。更多博主对这些高管进行了冷嘲热讽。

希尔-伍德承认，罗布森的结论并不新颖，但它们听上去很真实，相比于有关这个主题的各种调查、学术研究和分析师报告，其表述方法独树一帜。这位令人尊敬的35岁主管表示：“人们会觉得它有些无法抗拒。这份报告非常直接、语调自信，没有矫揉造作的言辞。”

幸运的是，罗布森对Twitter的贬低，发表在这家初创网站蜜月期似乎就要结束之际——参加太阳谷(Sun Valley)媒体年会的高管们把更多时间花在质疑其商业模式上，而不是奉承它的创办者。

罗布森的班主任特丽莎?杰斐(Trisha Jaffe)表示，对三、四十岁的人而言，“Twitter和其他的一切就好像是一个新世界，但在年轻人眼中，它并不是特别新奇。”

对报告的反响远远超出了摩根士丹利客户的范畴，媒体也在其中发挥了至关重要的作用。哈佛大学法学院(Harvard Law School)教授约翰?帕尔弗里(John Palfrey)表示，这件事情的传播方式是“web 2.0谜米的典型代表：主流媒体在显著位置进行报道，大众媒体人受到吸引并进行炒作，然后主流媒体再撰写相关文章。”帕尔弗里还是《生来数码：认识第一代数码人》(Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives)一书的作者。

帕尔弗里表示，尽管报纸担心它们对世界的作用正日渐减少，但起点“几乎总是《纽约时报》(The New York Times)、《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)或英国《金融时报》的头版报道。”

与汤姆?汉克斯(Tom Hanks)在《飞进未来》(Big)中扮演的角色一样，这次实习让一个少年暂时从媒体研究课程中脱离出来，去揭露年龄渐增的商业大亨们的不安全感。《飞进未来》拍摄于1988年，影片讲述的是一个孩子一夜之间变成了30多岁的中年人，然后凭借年轻人的激情，获得了自己梦寐以求的工作：整天测试玩具。

罗布森的名声给他“短暂的”雇主带来了另一个意想不到的好处，该银行正在开展一项计划之外的、由群众提供资源的试验。摩根士丹利已经收到了数以千计的评论和其他少年对罗布森报告的一系列改写，使他们得以开展统计数据更为精确的分析。

罗布森现在希望大学毕业后能从事“与银行业相关的”职业。明年夏天，他将会忙着考试，但在英国年轻人失业率升至1993年以来最高水平的一周，他是一名或许不需要自己的惠比特犬帮助，就能找到下一份工作的少年。

译者/董琴

原文网址: http://www.ftchinese.com/story.php?storyid=001027749

(intern in the news) the text of a generation: matthew robson

by andrew edgecliffe-johnson 2009-07-24

Matthew Robson's opinions have been pored over this week everywhere from the Huffington Post to The Hindu. He has been blogged on, twittered about and discussed anxiously in boardrooms and investment offices around the world. Tabloid journalists have offered money for his story. Not bad for a kid aged 15 years and seven months whose summer holidays started on Saturday.

Two weeks ago, Mr Robson was pretty pleased at being one of half a dozen London schoolchildren to secure a work experience placement at Morgan Stanley's Canary Wharf offices.

Such positions usually go to the friends and family members of well-connected bankers. In Mr Robson's case, the networking was done by his whippet, Rudy, who dragged his mother into conversation with the wife of one of Morgan Stanley's media analysts while both walked their dogs in Greenwich Park.

After a week of presentations by senior staff, the Kidbrooke comprehensive school pupil felt he had grasped the basics of banking, and was looking forward to a secondment to the European media research desk.

Many a teenage internship has been spent fetching Starbucks orders and being otherwise ignored. But Mr Robson struck lucky when Edward Hill-Wood, the head of the team, asked him to spend a few days pulling together an account of his friends' media and communications habits. Mr Hill-Wood's decision to publish the three- page report Mr Robson handed in has made the 15-year-old the world's most famous intern since Monica Lewinsky.

The report made for stark reading for the bank's clientele. His peers see advertising, the struggling sector's congealing lifeblood, as “extremely annoying and pointless”. They “cannot be bothered” to read a newspaper, never buy CDs or use yellow pages directories, and generally try to avoid paying for anything other than concerts and cinema tickets.

While mobile phones are central to their social lives, the friends he canvassed (by text message) avoid expensive handsets for fear of losing them, do not use the mobile internet as it costs too much and prefer games consoles for free chat.

An ominous portrait emerged from his calm prose of a generation that hates to pay for entertainment and communications. As if to deal a final blow to middle-aged views of how the world works, he added that “teenagers do not use Twitter” because updating the micro-blogging phenomenon from mobiles would use up credit better used to text friends.

The response was instant, global and without precedent. After a front page write-up in Monday's Financial Times, the non-twittering teenager became the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles, innumerable blog posts and thousands of tweets.

“It is far and away the most significant reaction to a note we've ever been involved in and is certainly going to go down as one of the most widely read notes ever published by Morgan Stanley,” says Mr Hill-Wood, who gave up counting the calls and e-mails pouring in.

As his parents bought armfuls of newspapers and teachers printed articles for his class to discuss, “I typed my name into Google and saw how many stories my name came up in,” Mr Robson said on Friday.

“I got an e-mail from my cousin in Belgium saying it was in the Belgian press and then an e-mail from my uncle in Australia saying it was in the Australian press. It's been a frenzy.”

The blogosphere can be an unforgiving place, and plenty of commentators disputed Mr Robson's conclusions or questioned his credentials.

If he were to do it again, he might add something on magazines and books, and a note about himself. “Some of the comments were ‘I bet he goes to a really posh private school and his dad is the head of Morgan Stanley',” he noted.

Many more bloggers mocked the executives who had seized on his findings for being surprised by what their own children could have told them.

His conclusions were not novel, Mr Hill-Wood admits, but they rang true and their presentation stood out from all the surveys, academic studies and analysts' reports on the subject. “People find it somewhat overwhelming. This was very direct, with a confident tone, and said it without mincing words,” says the venerable 35-year-old.

It helped that Mr Robson's Twitter put-down landed as the start-up's honeymoon appeared to be ending, with executives at the annual Sun Valley media conference spending more time questioning its business model than fawning over its founder.

To people in their 30s and 40s, “Twitter and all the rest of it feels as if it is a new world, but for youngsters it's not staggeringly amazing,” says Trisha Jaffe, Mr Robson's head teacher.

The medium was also as critical as the message in generating buzz far beyond Morgan Stanley's clients. The way the story spread was “a classic story of a web 2.0 meme,” says John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. “The mainstream media reports it in a prominent place, social media people are intrigued by it and stir up the story, then the mainstream media write the story about the story.”

Despite newspapers' neuroses about their diminishing role in the world, the starting point “is almost always a front page story in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the FT,” Prof Palfrey argues.

Like the Tom Hanks character in Big, the 1988 film about a child in the body of a 30-year-old whose youthful enthusiasm wins him a dream job testing toys all day, it has taken a teenager on a break from his media studies lessons to expose the insecurities felt by the ageing barons of the business.

Mr Robson's fame has had another unexpected benefit for his (brief) employers, who are now in the middle of an accidental crowd-sourcing experiment. The bank has received thousands of comments and a series of re-writes of Mr Robson's work from other teenagers, allowing them to work on a more statistically accurate analysis.

Mr Robson now hopes to go into “something banking-related” after university. He will be busy with exams next summer, but in a week when unemployment among the UK's youth rose to its highest level since 1993, he is one teenager who may not need his whippet's help to get his next job.

原文网址: http://www.ftchinese.com/story.php?lang=en&storyid=001027749

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没看明白，不过俺知道一夜成名的秘书，因为不给老板开办公室的门，而走红