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News professionals and sports fans may be interested to take their first peak at the UK government's 'virtual media centre' for the 2012 Olympics. These initial pages went live yesterday. The full package will become available in early 2012. 

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.

There is an increasing number of new news outfits that depend greatly on the support of their communities. It is thus not surprising that many are turning into ways of engaging with their audience directly through community events. Such happenings aren't only a way to create closer ties with readers - they can also serve as an additional revenue source.
 
Nieman Journalism Lab reported on such efforts at The Texas Tribune. The Tribune has already hosted over 60 events, and in September it will put on a festival, presenting "debate, discussion and dialogue" on subjects that affect people in Texas. Evan Smith, The Tribune's chief editor and executive, said that such events are not only about journalism - although that is an important aspect of them as well - but they are also a way to produce revenue, from sold tickets and sponsorships.

This model seems particularly relevant for local non-profit news outlets as they rely greatly on the support and loyalty of their communities. But The Texas Tribune's success with events could be a valuable lesson for news organisations in general. Encouragingly, The Tribune is not the only innovative news outlet that is experimenting with hosting events.

The hyperlocal trend keeps on growing as more and more companies start hyperlocal efforts. The latest one to launch is TapIn, an iPod and iPhone app by the people behind Tackable, an app designed to make newsgathering easy. TapIn, however, is something more ambitious, as it combines several elements that are found in other location-based apps in order to disseminate and gather news. 

"We think that it's going to serve as an interesting prototype for the newspaper of the future," Tackable's chief marketing officer Luke Stangel said to Poynter. At the heart of TapIn is the idea of location-based news filtering. It may not be the ideal solution for all situations, as Poynter noted, but can work very well for news outlets that concentrate on community news.

For now, TapIn uses content from the MediaNews Group's newspapers in the San Francisco Bay region, but it already has plans to expand to Los Angeles and Denver markets, where MediaNews has more newspapers.

Some people say that 'hyperlocal' is the future of journalism. But for Bart Brouwers and editors like him, hyperlocal represents the past, present and the future.

"Reporting about what's close to you always gives the best results for your audience," says Mr Brouwers, the Managing Editor for hyperlocal online at Telegraaf Media Group in the Netherlands and a speaker at the upcoming Summer University in Paris organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum.

Success for hyperlocal projects depends on "credibility, authenticity and the ability to mix fine journalism and an engaged audience with sustainable business models," he says.

Guardian News & Media (GNM), the publisher of The Guardian, announced yesterday that it would become a "digital-first" organisation. Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of GNM, and Andrew Miller, chief executive of Guardian Media Group (GMG), revealed outlines of a "major transformation programme", which would push operations at The Guardian "beyond the newspaper, shifting focus, effort and investment towards digital, because that is our future".

Miller described The Guardian's undertaking as "a major transformation that will see us change from a print-based organisation to one that is digital-first in philosophy and practice". The company said the new strategy was a response to challenges facing the whole media industry, which is seeing on the one hand a decline in print circulation and advertising revenues, but on the other, rapid growth in digital audiences.

The GMG chief also said that the newspaper and its sister publication The Observer had lost £33 million in cash terms last year. He warned that unless GMG changed its business operations, it could run out of cash in three to five years. The new strategy includes a plan to save £25 million over the next year. More importantly, the newspaper aims to double its digital revenues, which are expected to be at £47 million in the current financial year.

2010 was the year of the paywall.
Trying to figure out how to transit newspapers' print businesses to the digital world, one of the big questions was: is charging online the way to go?

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was one of those to lead the way in charging for online content, putting the UK Times and Sunday Times behind a paywall in July 2010.

Before the News Corp group, the German publisher Alex Springer began charging for online access with some of its newspapers.

It was actually a path already chosen by some niche publications, which provided (and still provide) specialized content, like financial and business news.
Within financial news publications, amongst the first ones to charge for content were the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch originally pointed as a model to follow, and the Economist, which introduced between the end of 2009 and beginning 2010 a paywall for the print-edition content on its website.
It has to be noted however that financial news is an area in which subscribers might be more willing to pay for online. 

The International Journalism Festival took place in Perugia, Italy, last week, with a diverse range of sessions on various aspects of the profession. Below is a selection of some of our favourite quotes and ideas from speakers.

"What is so exciting about now is that anything is possible."
- Charles Lewis, founder of the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

"Communities are now helping to define the news outlets around which they grow."
- Justin Peters, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review online.

"We are looking at a golden age of stupidity on social networks."
- Ed Walker, online communities editor, Media Wales.

The 2011 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday, April 18, and for the first time, a web-only piece won one of the coveted awards.

Other peculiarities this year included the fact that no newsroom dominated the Prizes - 11 split 13 awards between them - as Poynter underlined. And despite the jury recommending three finalists, the Pulitzer Board decided not to award any news organization for the Breaking News Reporting category.

The New York Times and Los Angeles Times won two prizes each, and surprisingly the investigative report award went to Paige St. John of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune for a property insurance investigation.

Most interesting is the prominence of online-only news organizations, as the independent and non-profit ProPublica took home its second Pulitzer. As Nieman noted, unlike the last year prize, won by Sheri Fink for Investigative Reporting, which was published in partnership with The New York Times Magazine, this year's prize was for a web-only series and it didn't move through a partner newspaper. 

Paywalls have been erected by various news organizations over the past few years, but never has a paywall extended over a whole country. Nieman Lab reports that a group of media companies in Slovakia are attempting to do just that.

Nine major news organizations- including three broadsheet newspapers, a tabloid, two magazines and a television station- have partnered together through Piano Media for the project. The project launches today, April 18th, and will be free for the first two weeks. After that, users will pay €0.99 ($1.41/£0.87) per week or €2.90 ($4.14/£2.54) per month.

The journalist's job is to report the truth, but there are places by for doing this, reporters put their lives at risks. Not only in Pakistan and Mexico, which were the most deadly countries for journalists in 2010, but also in Calabria, in southern Italy.

Journalists under threat in this region were the subject of of the session entitled "Calabria: siren land" held yesterday at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.  

It emerged that life for journalists who just want to do their job - to report fact - could become really dangerous in Calabria. Bullets shot at a car, intimidating phone calls, burnt cars, letters containing death threats: twenty journalists were heavily threatened just in 2010, said "Ossigeno per l'informazione 2010", a report on information and journalism on the news overshadowed by violence in Italy.

On February 7 AOL announced its plan to buy the Huffington Post for $315m. The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world. It is the largest merger in American business history.

Reflecting on the Huffington Post's story, Marco Renzi, on the Italian website LSDI, asked some provocative questions about the Italian situation of online-only experiences.

The Huffington Post was born in 2005 as Internet-only news site with an initial investment of one million dollars. Six years later, the site now employs more than 200 people and reaches 25 millions visitors every month, also thanks to a really wide network of bloggers and contributors.

"There would be similar examples in Italy... but the structural differences are so evident that rather than provide hope, they provoke outrage and bafflement", Renzi wrote, "What publishing company would nowadays invest one million euro in a blog?" 

In an industry that has been facing several setbacks in the past years, Bloomberg News stands out, as the American Journalism Review notes.  While many news media outlets are downsizing and trying to find ways to cut back, Bloomberg L.P. plans on adding 150 journalists to its current number of 2,300 and paying them salaries of a reported $500,000, according to The New York Times.

Several factors account for Bloomberg's current success, AJR believes.  Its dedication to being the first and best has given it credibility; its acquisitions have added to its ability to provide its readers with the information they desire; and its branding appeals to its audience.

How do social networks fit into news gathering?

As Martin Langeveld reported on Nieman Lab, "the traditional social network just doesn't work when it comes to news" as Luke Stangel said.

Luke Stangel is the coufounder and chief marketing officer at Tackable, a Palo Alto-based startup tackling this problem by building a standalone social network that "organizes media on a map."

Tackable is an iPhone app-based social network focused on geotagged news photos and captions. 

"It's going to be an equation of 1+1 equals 11," said Tim Armstrong, the chairman and chief executive of AOL, announcing the company's acquisition of The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post, the ground-breaking online news and opinion site founded by Ariana Huffington on a shoestring budget, is, in fact, to be bought for $315m by AOL in a move sure to stun new media sceptics and believers alike, the Guardian reported.

As the New York Times reported, the two companies completed the sale on the evening of Sunday 6 Feburary and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. Out of the $315 million, AOL will pay $300 million in cash and the rest in stock.