The Independent has launched a new site called Independent Voices to focus on commentary and opinion content, combined with input from readers. “Its mission is captured in three words: Comment, Campaigns, Community,” said the platform’s editor Amol Rajan and editor-in-chief Evgeny Lebedev in an announcement on the site.

It will have its own editorial line and be independent of the Independent newspaper, Rajan said in another post. “What I want us to achieve is a marriage of editorial brilliance, in the form of strong and clear argument, with digital power, in the form of viral campaigns – all of it in alliance with a community of ultra-engaged users.”

The Independent print product’s Opinion pages will, however, be renamed Independent Voices. The paper has a long history of focusing on comment and opinion, since former editor Simon Kelner's editorial strategy that was dubbed the 'viewspaper' concept back in 2003.

Online newspapers tired of catering to Apple’s in-app purchasing restrictions are starting to bypass the tech giant completely by creating web-based apps using HTML5 technology, Journalism.co.uk reports. The latest title to jump on the trend? Washington’s local paper The Chronicle, which offers the HTML5 app as part of a subscription bundle that includes complete online and print access, the article said.

The Chronicle’s web app is similar to a “native” iPad app in terms of user experience; rather than downloading the app from Apple’s Newsstand, though, one can access the web app through the iPad’s Internet browser and save it as an icon on the homescreen, the article said. App users can share articles through Facebook and Twitter, as well as download stories to read them offline later, the article said.

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Tomorrow it will be one year since Piano Media launched Slovakia’s national paywall, and today CEO Tomas Bella announced that the company has secured €2 million in funding from a 3TS Capital Partners' Cisco-backed fund.

For publishers, this means that Piano will be able to offer more analytical tools and data about what works and what doesn’t, better software, and as the company expands into new markets, more countries with which to share know-how and best practices, Bella said.

Bella was not always a fan of the paywall: when he became editor-in-chief at a major Slovakian daily several years ago, he took down the paper’s paywall. But he gradually came to believe that unless papers found a way to charge people online, they would not survive, and he started to think about what the easiest way to charge would be.

Piano Media has launched a simple system for multiple publications with one flat fee and one log-in, which he compared to a cable TV package. You can buy the subscription at any of the participating publishers and you can move between the different sites without logging in. Eleven media outlets are on board in Slovakia, and nine in Slovenia, whose paywalls launched in January 2012.

The Guardian opened a dedicated space on its website for videos produced by Newton, a public service science channel, the newspaper reported last week. The new website will feature “interviews with scientists, fascinating lectures, heated debates and topical reports, and perhaps even science-y meetings in pubs that might be of interest to an even wider audience”, the announcement said.

The partnership between the Guardian and Newton started originally 18 months ago, but previously the videos produced by the channel had been hosted among the Guardian’s other video offerings. The new dedicated space comes “As part of our increasing commitment to online video”, the paper said.

Newton TV specialises on science films in particular, and correspondingly the newly launched Newton Channel is part of the science section of the Guardian’s video pages. Newton will operate independently, but there would most probably be plenty of Guardian collaborations as well, the newspaper said.