Around 1 p.m. EST yesterday, panic spread after the Associated Press (AP) Twitter account announced that US President Barack Obama had been wounded from a series of explosions at the White House. Minutes later, the AP revealed that their account had been hacked.

With 1.9 million followers, the concession of retweets spread like wildfire, reaching the stock market where the Dow lost 130 points within a few minutes before returning to it original level.

The fake tweet read: “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

The AP quickly announced that their account had been hacked and was suspended yesterday. Following the incident, an FBI investigation is under way. An AP staffer said on his Twitter account that the attack came shortly after a number of AP employees had received a phishing email.

Hacking can have strong implications for a venerable publication like the AP.

“A media publisher conceivably could be sued for negligence if things are published under their name that is not true and if they didn’t take reasonable steps to prevent the erroneous publication of information,” said Nick Economidis to Bloomberg.

If you thought photo-sharing app Instagram was little more than a platform for rich kids to post photos of their luxury yachts, think again. Journalists and news organisations are increasingly using the social networking application, bought for $1 billion in April of this year by Facebook, as a tool for reporting on news and events.

NPR, NBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, WSJ and The Washington Post are just some of the major news outlets that are seeking to harness the opportunities provided by Instagram’s blend of social interaction and content creation. Only last week photojournalists covering the 2012 presidential election for the AP were asked by the organisation to use their personal Instagram feeds in a professional capacity:#aponthetrail is designed to give the public an intimate insight into elements of the U.S presidential campaign that often go unreported.

Today the Associated Press opened the first fully-operated news bureau in North Korea from a Western news organisation, a press release announced. The international news wire's office in Pyongyang will be the first to offer, with a full-time staff, a video and text coverage from the country. The plan to open the bureau was announced last June.

According to the Guardian, the opening arrives after months of discussions with the Korea Central News Agency, inside which the new office will be based, and it was originally planned to open last December but it has been postponed after the death of leader Kim Jong-il.

The agency already had a video office in North Korea six years ago through its London-based Associated Press Television News (APTN) and it has been the only independent foreign media news agency operating in North Korea till now, as reported on the APTN website.

The Associated Press has announced the release of its automated style-checking software, AP StyleGuard. For the APs online subscribers, the AP StyleGuard plug-in, developed by Equiom Linguistic Labs, has been available for download since December 16.

The programme acts as a proof reading tool, much like Microsoft Office spell check, and tells journalists when they their writing departs from the stylistic rules dictated by the AP Style Guide. Bassam Saliba, co-founder of Equiom Linguistic Labs, said "We developed AP StyleGuard as a Microsoft Office enhancement, by integrating AP Stylebook to allow authors to interactively validate the quality and consistency of news articles, press releases and documents". The program has taken more than a year to develop and is currently in the beta phase of development, available only for Microsoft operating systems.

Colleen Newvine, product manager for AP Stylebook, told WAN-IFRA all about the motivations for creating the product, the impact the software will have on journalists and the future of AP StyleGuard.