Facebook has introduced new brand pages that more closely resemble the 'timelines' that have already been available to individuals for some time. An introductory video from the social network's marketing team says "We will be giving you new ways to tell your story and express your page's identity" and promises "better tools to manage the activity on your page and to have conversations with your audience."

One key change is the introduction of a 'cover photo' - a large picture across the top of the page - in addition to the profile picture. Facebook advises that the cover photo should be a unique photo that expresses your page, and forbids placing advertisements or promotions here. It recommends pictures of your product, or of people using your services. The profile picture will continue to be used around Facebook, and the company therefore suggests using a logo.

The new layout also allows brands to highlight content more effectively. They can now 'pin' a post to the top of the timeline stream for up to a week, or 'star' a post to make it wider. 'Milestones' are larger, dated posts that can be used to emphasise important moments in the history of a brand or company, and to create a more thorough timeline, you can change the post date of content so you can go back and fill in gaps. The New York Times has used this to highlight 'select moments' from its 160+ year history such as the 1928 presidential election or the 1977 blackout.

Does 'plundering' information from Facebook raise similar ethical questions to phone-hacking? Glenda Cooper, a lecturer at London's City University, studied the ethical implications of journalists using information from Facebook without the users' permission, as reported by Press Gazette.

"What kind of journalism are we getting if every part of your life is only a mouseclick away from being splashed across the front page of a national paper?" Press Gazette quotes Cooper as saying. Clearly, taking information that has been made public online is very different to phone-hacking, which involves stealing private information, but it is still using information that was not provided for journalistic purposes.

As journalists frequently have less time to report, due to both financial pressures and the need to break stories online quickly, this kind of "short-cut journalism," using social media to find out about individuals, has increased, the study said.

The Internet is not an actor in itself and reflects the motives and the will of those who use it, said Cynthia Wong at the WPFC and UNESCO-organised conference in Paris last week, The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World.

Wong, Director of the Project on Global Internet Freedom, at the Center for Democracy & Technology, underlined the need to remember this in her opening remarks.

As Frank La Rue, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, explained, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were not 'internet revolutions' - they were facilitated by the Internet, but the Internet was not an actor. Given this however, these events undoubtedly showed how important the Internet has become not just in giving access to information, but also as a main instrument for citizen participation in politics.
Internet facilitates access to political issues and makes it easier for everyone to express their opinions and interact with each other. However, La Rue said, the Internet has also tremendous pitfalls which need to be addressed. Governments, even in the West, are scared about these implications and try to block, filter, monitor and limit the Internet.

On 9 February the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the 2012 News Challenge. The annual contest in media innovation, which "seeks new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age", has been renewed, expanded and narrowed, as John Bracken, director of the journalism and media innovation at Knight, explains.

After an initial programme of 5 years during which $27 million have been granted and 12,000 applications made, the new contest has been broken up into three different challenges.
The theme of the first contest is "leveraging networks" and applications will open on February 27th.

The aim of the contest is not to invent a new network, Knight's vice president for journalism and innovation, Michael Maness, explains in a video, but to use existing platforms and tools to make new models or apps that benefit story-telling, investigative reporting and boost innovation in journalism.

Knight News Challenge 2012 from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.