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On 8 February, the same day that The Washington Post announced its fifth round of newsroom buyouts in the past several years, the Forbes website posted a long profile of Washington Post Chairman and CEO Donald E. Graham by Jeff Bercovici titled "Nice Guy, Finishing Last: How Don Graham Fumbled the Washington Post Co." that highlights a number of challenges and setbacks the company has suffered in recent years.

Among these are missed opportunities with Facebook and Politico, as well as major losses sustained from Newsweek (reportedly $40 million in the two years before the company sold it) and recent problems relating to its Kaplan education unit.

As all of these areas have suffered, so has the company's best known product, its namesake newspaper, which has seen circulation fall by 40% since 1995 (to just over 500,000).

You've got a scoop, do you tweet it or not?

As a journalist, your news organization might well have a social media policy which doesn't allow you to do it.

On February 7 Sky News sent an email to staff drawing up new social media guidelines. As the Guardian reported, journalists have been told they are banned from retweeting information from any non-Sky employee. The new guidelines include a warn for journalists to stick to their own beat and to the stories they've been assigned to. "Don't tweet when it's someone else's story. Stick to your own beat. Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks" the mail says, according to the Guardian. 

Italian daily La Stampa is to integrate its newsroom, taking what its editor in chief Mario Calabresi has described as "a step towards the future". Calabresi announced the move, which will incorporate both physical changes and staff changes as well as a change in CMS, in a letter published on February 6. "A newspaper is a lively body that needs to be able to adapt itself to its environment," wrote Calabresi.

This step forward is reflected in the creation of three new job positions, which are intended to form a bridge between print and the integrated future. By introducing a digital editor, a web editor and a social media editor La Stampa hopes to make the transition to fully integrated newsroom a reality in terms of people and workflow. 

16-17 February 2012, Room IV, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France

The conference "The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World" aims to gather leading media representatives, professional and "citizen" journalists and media law experts to exchange views on these issues and to discuss good practices in traditional professional journalism and citizen journalism in the digital era.

With a stunning 2 billion persons estimated to be using the Internet and producing 156 million public blogs in 2011, there has been a surge of social networks, user-generated content and micro-blogging that has enabled all Internet users to become public communicators. Along with the spread of the Internet, WikiLeaks' release of a massive number of classified government documents and its initial collaboration with traditional news media has modified the media landscape and raised crucial questions for journalism.

According to a new survey, more than half of tablet owners are interested in reading digital magazines, Mediapost.com reported (via MediaMe). 

Journalism.co.uk reported that The Globe Mail, a new nonprofit online journalism startup, launched today in Australia.