The transition from print to digital in the face of falling ad revenues and declining print circulation is causing a great deal of pain at established, professional news organisations. Think of the 600 cuts announced yesterday at Advance Publications in New Orleans and Alabama, or the recent cuts made at Johnston Press.

Yet this same switch to digital is being mirrored by some student publications - which are not bemoaning the end of print, but positively embracing it.

Nieman Lab reported last week that the University of Oregon’s student newspaper The Daily Emerald is cutting down print production and moving to digital despite not being in debt, having a “solid reserve fund” in the bank and just having experienced its best financial year in over a decade.

Rather than responding to immediate financial pressure, the Emerald says that it is making the switch “to deliver on our mission to serve our community and prepare our student staff for the professional world.”

“Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life”

“I Can’t Stop Looking at This Weird Chinese Goat”

“Penguin Shits on Senate Floor”

These are just a few of the SEO-rich headlines that Nieman Lab mentioned a few months ago in an article about Gawker’s strategy to drive more traffic to its site. The ploy isn’t bad; Nieman’s data suggests that these three posts alone generated more than 100,000 page views.

But while penguins and pizza violence might drive a lot of traffic across the web to Gawker, two recent studies suggest that, when it just comes down to Twitter, users prefer plain news from trusted sources.

An article by Megan Garber for The Atlantic reports on a study produced by UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs, which suggests that “steadiness -- compelling news expressed in straightforward, not hyperbolic, language -- is actually a component of maximally shareable content.”

Twenty-three years after tanks surged into Beijing and the military opened fire on pro-democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square, Twitter’s primary Chinese counterpart Sina Weibo has snuffed out the virtual flames of remembrance. Talk of the tragedy of June 4, 1989, which has never been publically commemorated in mainland China, is now being censored in both state-controlled and social media.

Yesterday Sina Weibo, the largest and most popular microblogging site in China, deactivated a candle emoticon – formerly used to commemorate deaths reported in the news – when its "rumour control" squad noticed that netizens had begun to adopt it as a symbol of the Tiananmen anniversary, according to the Shanghaiist.

Soon afterward, the Olympic flame emoticon, designed to promote this summer’s games, was deployed as a replacement, and extinguished in turn.

Sina Weibo also blocked access to the search terms “candle” and “never forget,” and to references to the date of the crackdown that took place 23 years ago today such as “six four” (June 4) and “23,” reported The Next Web.

Remember the days before Craigslist, when newspapers made money from classified advertising?

In the year 2000, the U.S. newspaper industry brought in a high of nearly $20 billion dollars in classified revenue; by 2009, this figure had plummeted to under $10 billion. Meanwhile, the number of adult Internet users who visited online classified sites jumped from 22% in 2005 to 49% in 2009, according to findings from the Pew Research Centre’s Internet & American Life Project.

Since last fall, the Guardian Media Group has worked to recapture some of that lost revenue with n0tice.com, the digital answer to a community centre corkboard, which asks users, “what’s happening near you?” To post is free, but as with promoted Tweets, n0tice-ers can bump their bulletins to a privileged spot on the board for a fee.