A moment in time: Getting the news

Keeping up with the news was a very different affair 30 years ago. At a time when subscribing to news papers was generally seen as a luxury, pages were shown publicly in display cases, as in the photo above taken in 1985 in Beijing. People gathered in front of the pages and stretched their necks for a closer look at the small printed characters. In some places people still get their news this way, but most have turned to the Internet. The photo on the right, taken in 2005, shows two generations of surfers online at a restaurant.