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The Guardian Media Group (GMG) today sold its regional media business to Trinity Mirror in a £44.8 million deal, it was widely reported. Of the price, £7.4 million comes in cash and Trinity Mirror is releasing GMG from a £37.4 million print contract.

The deal is due to be completed by March 28. The Guardian, which was previously known as the Manchester Guardian before moving its main office to London in the 1960s, will still have a Manchester-based reporter.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have extensively studied The New York Times list of most e-mailed articles, checking every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles, and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page, The New York Times reports.

Results from the study show that NYTimes readers have exalted tastes - seeking to inspire awe in their friends, colleagues, and family by choosing to e-mail positive articles over negative ones, and long, intellectually challenging articles over short and shocking ones.

All reporters at the Journal-Register Co. (JRC) will get video cameras, under an ambitious plan to bring the newspaper into the digital age, the company's 3,100 employees have been told. The company's new CEO John Paton has also told staff that they now work for a 'media company', not a 'newspaper company'. Appropriately enough, he announced the news in a seven-minute slideshow, emailed companywide, the New Haven Independent reports.

"We're not looking to make any cuts," Paton told the Independent. "We need to improve [local coverage]. We don't need to make it worse." The company, which runs 19 daily and 150 other newspapers, including the flagship New Haven Register, filed for bankruptcy last February.

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger told Reuters that "if we get the right functionality and design," the iPad could "produce interesting, significant revenue streams," according to PaidContent.

Because developing an application for the iPad will not require any different skills from the ones required to launch an iPhone app, news publishers that have had success with iPhone apps, are now looking to cash in on the iPad.

The free weekly newspaper in Edinburgh will relaunch next week with a greater focus on shopping and local listings, All Media Scotland reports.

The new-look Edinburgh Herald & Post, produced by The Scotsman's publishers, is expected to focus on the shopping and services sector in the city with consumer news and features. It will also include local listings and a picture gallery to focus on community events. The newspaper will be distributed free to households across Edinburgh from Thursday.

Vendors shipped a record 54.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009, 39% more than the 39.2 million shipped in the same quarter in 2008, according to IDC information on PC World.

Four of the top five smartphone sellers beat their shipments records for a single quarter, according to numbers released by the International Data Corporation (IDC). Following a 98% increase in smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, Apple has regained its spot as third largest smartphone vendor, behind longtime leaders Nokia and Research in Motion

A newspaper in Manchester has been using various multimedia tools to liveblog council meetings from across the Greater Manchester Area, Press Gazette reports.

Meetings of the local authorities are attended by a reporter from the Manchester Evening News (MEN) or one of its sister weekly publications. Reporters then use Twitter to file updates minute-by-minute. Their updates are then streamed on MEN websites using CoverItLive technology, which allows liveblogging and other forms of real-time updating.

The MEN has so far used this to report on meetings of the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities and the Greater Manchester Police Authority. The newspaper wants to extend the service so that it can cover every full meeting held by ten local authorities across Greater Manchester.

The Press Association, the national news agency in the UK, will send its largest-ever Winter Olympics team to this month's games in Vancouver, Hold the Front Page reports.

PA Sport sent two reporters to the last winter Games in Turin in 2006, but will send 13 this time, including, for the first time, two video journalists.

The MediaNews Group has released details of its plans to charge for content online, announced in November last year, Bloomberg reports. The publisher will adopt a metered system similar to that planned at The New York Times.

Two newspapers, the Daily Record in York, Pennsylvania, and the Enterprise-Record in Chico, California, will start charging in May. They will give users access to up to 25 'premium' articles a month, after which they will be required to pay a fee. Print subscriptions will include access to the website. Premium content may include some columns and investigative reporting, MediaNews president Joseph Lodovic said.

Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter has announced that it will cut between 100 and 120 jobs after sustaining multi-million euro losses, The Local reports. This amounts to almost one sixth of the newspaper's workforce.

The company employs 580 people, with half of these in the newsroom. Most of the cuts are expected to affect editorial staff, with more than a third of these set to go.

The newspaper reported losses of 97 million kronor, or around €10 million, last year. Despite this, union official Hans Arbman said that the cuts were unexpected.