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Twenty-nine US news organizations launched yesterday, January 5, NewsRight, a digital content licensing organization. Amongst the affiliates are the Associated Press, the New York Times Co, Hearst Newspapers and the Washington Post Co.

The aim is to keep track of newspapers' content as it moves around the web in order to license and profit from it. It "will measure the unpaid online use of their original reporting and seek to convert unauthorized websites, blogs and other newsgathering services into paying customers", AP (via the Washington Post) reported.

NewsRight is an evolution of the News Registry, a project started in October 2010 by AP and some partners. 

2011 was a big year for news in more ways than one. Reporters were amply tested in their coverage of big breaking news stories such as the death of Osama Bin Laden or Muammar Gaddafi, major disasters such as the Fukushima earthquake, and complex political unrest much of the Arab World.

Meanwhile, newspapers continue to seek an effective digital business model, to tackle the challenges posed by social media and community involvement, to create innovative tablet applications and respond to ethical dilemmas. Looking forward to 2012, what can we expect?

Social media - will Facebook remain the undisputed leader?

Social media sprang to the forefront of the global stage in early 2011, with many directly attributing the extent of the uprisings in the Arab World to the power of Facebook and Twitter. Citizen reporting and commentary on events using social media has also flourished in the Arab World, and Anglophones have followed Twitter coverage via NPR's Andy Carvin. Will this use of social networks to provoke and cover dramatic uprisings continue?

Facebook, with its 800 million plus users, has been a top priority for news organisations in terms of their social media strategy in 2011, dwarfing smaller players such as Foursquare and so far fending off competition from new arrivals such as Google+. Most publications now have at least one Facebook page and several are experimenting with new apps using Facebook's Open Graph initiative. So far, readership levels seem to be high and it is likely that more news organisations will be keen to tap readers through Facebook.

Will Facebook's dominance continue into 2012, or will a network like Google+ - which has just introduced changes to make it more appealing to brands and businesses - put up a worthy fight? Twitter is also planning to introduce brand pages - what impact will these have?

Already, many journalists have vast numbers of fans and followers of their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts - will 2012 see a growing divide between brands and individuals on social media?

Bringing the community into the newsroom

In the world of the overwhelming information on the Web, newspapers are struggling to sustain their role as a central hub for news, and in 2011 many started to focus on interacting more closely with their communities and encouraging conversation among their readers as well as between readers and the papers.

Readers have been invited to participate in the process of local journalism in JRC's Register Citizen's newsroom café, where the paper's new office allows the public into the newsroom on a daily basis to influence, comment on and enhance coverage. Involving readers in the daily editorial decision making process is also the aim of Swedish local paper Norran's live chat eEditor, where readers can discuss story ideas with journalists in real time. Becoming accessible also means becoming more transparent, which is what the Guardian set out to do by publishing the paper's newslist online.

Expect to see more of such attempts to put readers at the heart of the newsgathering process in 2012 as newspapers realize the benefits of a strong and loyal community.

Business model uncertainty continues

In March 2011 The New York Times launched its much-anticipated paid digital content strategy and others have followed suit. Metered, intermittent, or impenetrable: no single digital paywall strategy has yet proven itself as the best. The existence of multiple digital devices means that most news organisations who do charge offer various different subscription offers across platforms.

Monetizing app content brings further complications as it means dealing with those who control operating systems such as Apple, which takes a 30% cut of all App Store purchases. Expect to see more newspapers following the example of the Financial Times, which has launched a browser-based HTML5 app that allows it to bypass Apple's store completely.   

It's unlikely that a definitive solution to the digital monetisation question will emerge in 2012: expect to see newspapers continuing to experiment with new ways to strike the best balance between charging for content and not losing readers. Hopefully we will also see attempts to find new business models as news organisations realize that there might not be just one strategy.

Delivery methods

At the end of 2011, the word 'tablet' no longer necessarily conjures up just an image of the iPad, as it did at the beginning of the year. Apple still shipped more than half the world's tablet devices sold in the third quarter of 2011, retaining a 61.5% share of the global market, and no competitor claimed more than 6%, but cumulatively they have managed to make a dent in Apple's dominance.

In 2012 we can expect to see Apple's market share continue to slide and Android-powered devices becoming more common, although there is little doubt that the iPad will remain the most common device.

In terms of what news organisations offer on the tablet, we can hope that 2012 will see some innovative and exciting new products. Although some impressive exceptions exist (such as Ringier's the collection), many papers have adopted a straightforward approach to tablet apps that does not take full advantage of what the device has to offer.

Some news organisations have already taken big steps with HTML5 and by the end of 2012 it may well be common for papers to produce HTML5 products before native apps, both for financial motivations (see above) and for ease of developing.

The tablet market is growing but it is still tiny compared to the smartphone market - maybe 2012 will also see news organisations re-evaluating their priorities in terms of digital delivery and focusing on the phone as a key device.

Newsroom organisation: digital comes first
 
The digital first mantra advocated by John Paton of the Journal Register Company has led to the creation of a new company actually called Digital First, a result of the merger between JRC and MediaNews Group, and the subsequent roll-out of this philosophy at many local US newspapers. Digital first is not intended to imply neglect of the print product, but rather a recognition of the fact that digital must come first in the news cycle, and that digital surely is the future and it is worth investing in it now.
 
The Guardian has also expressed its commitment to going digital first "in philosophy and practice," a process which involves losing staff but also taking on more developers and others with digital skills.
 
In 2012, expect to see other publishers making steps towards digital first as there is a growing acceptance of the necessity to concentrate efforts on building a business out of digital news. Many are realizing that achieving true newsroom integration is a long and complex process that requires an entire overhaul of workflows, processes and mindsets in the newsroom if it is to be truly effective, so they are looking for next steps.

New skills in the newsroom
 
Data, data and more data. In 2011 we saw an explosion of data-powered journalism, often displayed through visualizations, infographics, and interactive maps and apps. New web tools have made an incredible flood of raw data accessible which can then be visualized, organized in searchable databases, aggregated in interactive tools and used to investigate complex issues such as the UK riots that the Guardian analysed with the Reading the riots project. ProPublica also makes impressive use of data. 

Non-linear forms of storytelling are likely to feature highly on the agenda of forward-thinking news organisations in 2012 and consequently journalists will have to keep up with the skills required to shape stories and make them comprehensible to the public. The data journalism handbook published during the Mozilla Festival in London last November could be useful in this.

Technical skills such as coding will likely become more and more essential for journalists entering the trade in 2012 and we may well see retraining of more experienced journalists so that they can make best use of what data has to offer.

A high level of competence in effectively using social media is also increasingly becoming necessary as its use becomes more and more integrated into reporting as well as communicating with readers.  

Phone-hacking - will this lead to increased regulation in 2012?
 
At the start of 2011, few would have thought that the year would end with one fewer national newspaper publishing in the UK, and the entire press under scrutiny with regards to its ethical conduct. The phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch's The News of the World dominated media news in the UK in the second half of the year, and made headlines around the world as the paper was closed down and News International executives resigned. With both publishers and editors called in front of a judge, any belief that newspapers can defy the law with no questions asked has been strongly shaken.
 
2012 will see the beginning of the wider impact of the scandal as the Leveson Inquiry unfolds and recommendations are likely to be made for a more thorough regulation system in the UK. The inquiry will consider to whom the press is accountable, and how far outside interference is necessary.  Will self-regulation be deemed sufficient? Will there be an impact overseas? Will the results for journalism be positive or negative?

by Federica Cherubini and Emma Heald 

It's a matter of fact that Twitter has become part of the regular news workflow. And this is also the case for mainstream media outlets.

The craft of journalism has remained by and large the same over the past century. During the "Looking Beyond the Article" session of the World Editors Forum, Bill Adair, founder and editor of Politifact, suggests the industry could benefit from switching things up.

The history of the BNL Times of Malawi stretches back to 1895 - yet when it comes to mobile news, the company's general manager, Tikhala Chibwana, says they're the "new kids on the block."

Mobile news is gaining speed across Africa. But media executives are still grappling with how to best make this platform both innovative and profitable. During a WAN-IFRA workshop at the 2011 World Newspaper Week in Vienna, Austria, a group of media experts offered advice and tips to several African newspapers hoping to launch a mobile news project in the coming months.

The panelists agreed that all of the budding mobile projects sprouting up across the continent are potentially lucrative, but that they need to first invest time in creating a strong business plan.

Across Africa, newspapers are taking advantage of the continent's cell phone boom.

Currently, 218 million people throughout the continent use their cellphone to go online, and the number is projected to increase to over 435 million by 2015. Newspapers in countries, from South Africa, Ghana to Rwanda, are exploiting this trend as a new way to disseminate news and reach broader readership.

"There are editors who are doing just SMS and then there's people who are doing mobile apps for smart phones," said Louise Hallman, project manager for the Mobile News for Africa project. "When we talk about mobile Africa, it's not the same in every country. There are major differences between different countries."

As inma.org reported, one Austrian newspaper, Kleine Zeitung, has seen this forthcoming challenge and launched a pre-emptive strike: they have launched Kleine Kinderzeitung, a newspaper specifically designed for children.

There are already some very successful models for engaging children in current affairs and news in general. Take for instance the long-running BBC institution that is Newsround. The program was first broadcast in 1972, initially known as 'John Craven's Newsround', after its longstanding presenter and editor, the show continues to be aired today. 

From Twitter and Facebook, to crowdsourcing and gathering readers' photos, to community events: newspapers now have abundant ways to interact with their readers online. The World Editors Forum, to be held in Vienna from 12 to 15 October next, will focus on the new tools of social media to help editors build communities around their newspapers.

The annual conference, which runs concurrently to the World Newspaper Congress, will also offer a "Facebook for Journalists" workshop in which Facebook representatives will provide tips and advice on how Facebook can be better used by newsrooms, both to find sources and reach a larger audience.

The WEF session on building communities will feature Jim Brady, Head of Project Thunderdome, the Journal Register Company's initiative to engage audience and creating content across all platforms and geographies, Matthew Eltringham, Editor of the BBC College of Journalism website, Anette Novak, Editor-in-Chief of Norran in Sweden, and other speakers to be announced. 

As more and more efforts to provide news with a hyperlocal approach materialise, a pattern seems to be emerging. On the one hand, there are websites and newspapers that have sprung up from more or less local circumstances and that operate on a modest budget. On the other, there are big endeavours that attempt to cover several communities, AOL's Patch being the most notable example.

The Guardian discussed this pattern, noting that there seems to be another pattern when it comes to hyperlocal failures and successes. Using the Chingford Times as an example, it argued that small hyperlocal efforts done bottom-up have the best chance of succeeding. The Chingford Times, a fortnightly newspaper, belongs to Tindle Newspaper Group and costs £0.30 an issue. Although both the Chingford Times and Patch are in the hyperlocal news business, a quick comparison of numbers reveals how different they are from one another. The latter requires $120 million (£74 million) investment every year - compared to this, the Chingford Times's budget is miniscule, with the paper's profit per issue being currently at £2,000.

François-Xavier Lefranc, director of the regional and local newspaper Ouest-France spoke at WAN-IFRA's Summer University in Paris about the paper's new strategy in developing and multiplying local coverage in order to increase circulation.

As the name implies, Ouest-France, with 47 local editions, covers three regions in the west of France: Normandie, Bretagne and Pays de la Loire, which represent a mosaic of territories with 12 departments and 4800 towns.

According to French circulation bureau OJD's figures, it is the best selling French newspaper and, after Le Parisien, its website is second in the ranking of French regional newspapers' websites with 8.7 millions unique users.

Entrepreneurial thinking and community involvement are crucial to sustaining a hyperlocal site, said Bart Brouwers, managing editor for hyperlocal online Dichtbij of Dutch Telegraaf Media Group.

He was speaking at the 6th WAN-IFRA Summer University in Paris, which focuses on local and hyperlocal content as strategies for newspapers to be successful in the new media world.

Dichtbij, which in English means "close to me", started in 2010 with 4 pilot sites aiming to be a "hyperlocal, hyperpersonal, hypersocial platform for every Dutch citizen". It has gone national over the past year, after having thought about a sustainable business model based upon the above mentioned pilot-learnings sites and passing from 10 to more than 100 staff.

On Friday 10 June the state of Alaska released 24,199 pages of emails that Sarah Palin sent and received during her first 22 months' tenure as governor of Alaska.
Mother Jones, msnbc.com and ProPublica are partnering in publishing an online searchable archive of the emails.

As Mother Jones reported, this saga began with a request that David Corn, Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief, made almost three years ago.
As Corn reported, when John McCain chose Palin in 2008 as his vice in the presidential election running, reporters started a rush in digging into her past looking for interesting information.

Even before that time, in June 2008, Andrée McLeod, a citizen activist in Alaska, used the state's open-records law to request emails sent to and from two Palin's top aides to investigate the pair's political behaviour during official business hours.