Thanks to family connections, Chandler ended up in control of the Los Angeles Times in 1960. The paper he inherited was parochial and conservative, reflecting the city it served. Chandler jettisoned the anti-union dogma and set about building a west-coast rival to the New York Times. His paper was heavy on foreign news and serious, objective reporting. The result was hugely impressive—but not, as it turned out, suited to the internet era. In the past few years the paper has suffered repeated staff cuts. In 2007 it was acquired by a property magnate and in 2008 filed for bankruptcy protection。

　　The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. The Los Angeles Times’s foreign reporting is extremely good. But it is hard to argue that it is better than the stuff supplied by the New York Times or foreign papers—sources to which the residents of Los Angeles now have unfettered, largely free access via their laptops and iPhones. Similarly, it has never been clear why each major newspaper needs its own car reviewer: a Corolla is a Corolla, whether it is driven in Albuquerque or Atlanta. And by extension, it is not clear why presidential candidates or sport teams require huge journalistic entourages. Papers should concentrate on what they do best, which means, in many cases, local news and sport. If the rest is bought in from wire services or national outfits, readers are unlikely to complain—as long as there is enough competition between those larger providers to keep up standards (and thanks to the internet there probably is now). Specialisation generally means higher quality。

　　It is grim to forecast still more writers losing their jobs. But whether newspapers are thrown onto doorsteps or distributed digitally, they need to deliver something that is distinctive. New technologies like Apple’s iPad only make this more true. The mere acquisition of a smooth block of metal and glass does not magically persuade people that they should start paying for news. They will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that。

　　Text 3文章取自The Times(时代)，原文标题为：When Less Was More。文章主要讲述的是二战后美国人在房屋设计方面观点的一些转变和趋势。

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　　When Less Was More

　　We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of exuberance and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G.I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus。

　　But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish。

　　As we find ourselves in an era of diminishing resources, could “less” become “more” again? If so, the mid-20th-century building boom might provide some inspiration。

　　They were recently renovated. Economic austerity was only one of the catalysts for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase “less is more” was actually first popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States before World War II and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so than Mies。

　　Mies’s signature phrase means that less decoration, properly deployed, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood — materials that we take for granted today but that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies’s sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty。

　　The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller — two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet — than those in their older neighbors along the city’s Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings’ details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time。

　　Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House” aside, the trend toward “less” was not entirely foreign. In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright started building more modest and efficient houses — usually around 1,200 square feet — than the sprawling two-story ones he had designed in the 1890s and the early 20th century。

　　Even the consciously trend-setting Museum of Modern Art promoted restraint in the early postwar years. In 1945, it held an exhibition entitled “Tomorrow’s Small House: Models and Plans,” and the pioneering model houses that Marcel Breuer and Gregory Ain erected in the museum garden were small and sparsely detailed。

　　The “Case Study Houses” commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1962 were yet another homegrown influence on the “less is more” trend. Aesthetic effect came from the landscape, new materials and forthright detailing. In his Case Study House, Ralph Rapson may have mispredicted just how the mechanical revolution would impact everyday life — few American families acquired helicopters, though most eventually got clothes dryers — but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared。

　　“Less is more” wasn’t for everyone; modernism was popular mainly with the so-called “Progressives,” the professionals and intellectuals who commissioned modern houses. But these trend-setters were not alone in assuming there would be fewer servants in the future and that modern conveniences would make housework easier to do, especially in smaller quarters。

　　The popularity of simpler living made it possible for one American developer, William Levitt, to realize the prewar dream of the European modern architects to use industrialization for housing. During the war, Levitt had become an expert in mass-producing homes for shipyard workers in Virginia. When it ended, Levitt and his sons created a prototype 750-square-foot, one-floor house—with a living room, kitchen/dining area, two small bedrooms, a bathroom and an unfinished “expansion attic”—to fit on a 60 x 100 foot lot. Set on concrete slabs like those at the shipyards, the new houses were built quickly and cheaply on a sort of assembly line, with pre-cut lumber and nails shipped from the Levitts’ factories in California。

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