Everyone defines "digital first" a little bit differently, said Jim Brady, editor-in-chief at Digital First Media in the US, but what is important is that a switch to digital first involves real changes, not just rhetoric. Brady was speaking in Paris at a conference organized by the Online News Association and GESTE, a French online publishers group.

Going digital first is not a “shift” or a “transition:” it requires a reinvention of your operation, he said. And this can work, he emphasised. Under the leadership of CEO John Paton, the Journal Register Company (now part of Digital First Media) went from bankruptcy in 2009 to earnings of $41 million in 2010, and 30% of its revenue now comes from digital, up from 5%.

Digital First Media now runs the JRC and MediaNews Group: a total of 75 dailies and about 250 weeklies.

Brady pointed out that figures from Pew’s State of the News Media project show that, at least in the US, more and more people are accessing news online and it is extremely unlikely that the trend will reverse. Digital first is therefore the strategy for the future, he believes, and he warned about waiting until it’s too late to change course.

The Russian radio presenter Sergei Aslanyan has been hospitalised, after being lured out of his house and stabbed 20 times in the arms, neck and chest, says the Guardian. The article reports that Izvestiya newspaper has suggested that the attack may be linked to a recent radio appearance made by Aslanyan, in which he said disparaging things about the prophet Mohammed. However, it also notes that the attack may be connected with reporting that Aslanyan has done on the Russian car industry and corruption among traffic police.

The Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore celebrated their third birthday last April, at the same time as clocking up an an average of more that 1 million monthly users over the past year, writes Journalism.co.uk. The article quotes Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s data content, who says, “For us, what started off as an exercise for developers has proved really successful with the general readership too.”

Fresh off the media gossip mill, New York magazine has delved into the "whodunnit” surrounding the firing of former New York Times CEO Janet Robinson last December. The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon discuss Joe Hagan’s article.

Wasting no time on such frivolities, The New York Times updated its iPad and iPhone apps last week, reported the Nieman Journalism Lab. The new app will download content automatically overnight to save readers time and bandwidth and allow them to better customize their reading experience.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has called for a boycott of the Sunday newspaper City Press, demanding that it remove an image of “The Spear,” a painting by artist Brett Murray depicting President Jacob Zuma in a Lenin pose with exposed genitalia, from its website.

City Press has refused to censor the image. In a May 18 column titled "The spear of the nation stays up," Editor-in-Chief Ferial Haffajee defended the paper’s decision as part of its commitment to the freedom of expression, which is enshrined in South Africa’s constitution in order to protect "art that pushes boundaries" and "journalism that upsets holy cows," she wrote.

"City Press covered an art exhibition, an interesting and remarkable exhibition that marks a renaissance in protest art, which we are tracking...To ask us now, as the ANC has done, to take down an image from our website is to ask us to participate in an act of censorship. As journalists worth our salt, we can’t."