Online newspapers tired of catering to Apple’s in-app purchasing restrictions are starting to bypass the tech giant completely by creating web-based apps using HTML5 technology, Journalism.co.uk reports. The latest title to jump on the trend? Washington’s local paper The Chronicle, which offers the HTML5 app as part of a subscription bundle that includes complete online and print access, the article said.

The Chronicle’s web app is similar to a “native” iPad app in terms of user experience; rather than downloading the app from Apple’s Newsstand, though, one can access the web app through the iPad’s Internet browser and save it as an icon on the homescreen, the article said. App users can share articles through Facebook and Twitter, as well as download stories to read them offline later, the article said.

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USA Today is the latest paper to launch an app specifically for the Kindle Fire, Amazon's Android-powered tablet device that was launched at the end of September. The paper already has a general Android application for tablets, but seems to have deemed the device important enough to target directly.

The app features "a custom look and design specifically for the tablet" and provides "a convenient interactive package designed to take advantage of Kindle Fire's seven inch color touch screen," according to a press release from USA Today. The Fire runs on an older version of the Android OS than many new devices and has a very different user interface.

The app is available in Amazon's app store, which also boasts a Wall Street Journal Fire-specific app, as well as some Condé Nast titles. The Kindle Fire is already the second most popular tablet after the iPad and was projected to see a 13.8% market share in the last quarter of 2011, reported paidContent in December.

This is a big week for Flipboard. After launching in China on Monday, today the social news reader app has finally released a version for the iPhone.

The new iPhone app does just what Flipboard on the iPad did; collect stories from social media accounts as well as other sources and present them to readers in a visually pleasing format.

But there are significant differences. For one thing, the iPhone app works by swiping up and down, rather than the old format of turning pages from right to left. More importantly, the phone app introduces "cover stories". This new section learns from your interaction with content so that it can deliver stories that are most interesting and relevant to you.

The differences are part of a drive to distinguish between the lean-back platform of the iPad, which most people use before bed, and the lean-forward platform of the iPhone, which users are more likely to access on the go or standing in queues.

News today is all about being first; 'real time' is king; users want the latest information in the quickest possible time delivered straight to their mobile device so they are constantly kept abreast of unfolding world events. Right?

Well, yes... and no.

It seems that Facebook is producing something of a Lazarus effect for old news content. Stories that were written more than a decade ago are increasingly becoming viral phenomena thanks to the new 'frictionless sharing' system introduced by the social network in September.

Frictionless sharing means that articles read by Facebook users are automatically shared with friends. This means that if you happen to glance at a story with a sensationalist headline that was published by a site that uses a Facebook app to integrate their content into the network via "open graph", then that sensational headline will appear on all your friends' newsfeeds - many of whom are just as likely to be lured to click on said headline as you were. This process is repeated several times over; and then again; and again. Thus, the article goes viral.

The Guardian and The Independent have both integrated their content into Facebook and this has lead to wide and rapid distribution of their content via the social network.