French news site Rue89 will launch a site in Quebec in October, Quebec89.com, in partnership with information portal Branchez-vous.com (roughly translated as 'get connected), reported Les Echos.

Three young freelance journalists will provide Quebec-based news, and manage other collaborators, according to Quebec89.com, and the rest of the content will be supplied by Rue89. Rue89 is an online-only news site launched in May 2007 by a group of former Liberation journalists, and combines amateur contributions with professional editing.

The Quebecois site will be more locally focused than its parent site, and will have various other structural differences. It will concentrate on three areas: politics, media and society. Rue89 has been successful so far, raising money through advertising, reader donations and offering services such as website design, and already has one local section, Marseille89, and an economics section, Eco89.

As newspapers suffer, such as the biggest Canadian French-language daily La Presse which is currently under threat of closure, it could well be the time for low-cost online only sites such as Quebec89 to thrive.

This week, London police opened a 24-hour helpline for journalists covering two major metropolitan events - the weeklong environmental protest Camp for Climate Action and the annual Notting Hill Carnival. Certified members of the press can call the designated number to request assistance from a police press officer if they are having difficulties in reporting at the events.

The new helpline follows a report released in June criticizing police treatment of journalists at the G20 protests in April. In several incidents, police prevented reporters from crossing cordons, a direct violation of the Association of Chief Police Officers' guidelines for dealing with the press.

Regardless of how often the helpline is used, it is certainly a positive step in improving relations between the police and the press.

Meanwhile, attendees of Climate Camp received a crash course in citizen journalism yesterday as they learned how to "shoot, edit and distribute a 60-second report in less than 10 minutes" using a mobile phone. Workshop organizers Hamish Campbell and Richard Hering of visionOntv emphasized the importance of producing a quality clip quickly, particularly if police become rough with protesters and confiscate or smash their recording devices.

As news publishers of all kinds increasingly look to charitable sources and foundations for much needed injections of revenue, concerns have been raised over the sustainability of this remuneration, and the implications that this dependency poses for the future of newspapers. Journalism professor, Jeff Jarvis, however, is convinced that newspapers still have a future as sustainable businesses, rather than as charity cases.

Jarvis maintains the need for a redefinition of the news "ecosystem". Within this, newspapers, financial foundations and other content providers, such as citizen journalists are seen as equal "collaborators" in the process of news distribution. Offers of financial and human resources have a place within this new system, however, they are not to be seen as charity, as this perspective "assumes the newspaper produces, owns and controls the asset that is the news". Jarvis paints an image of "large cast of smaller, more specialised and efficient players" within which newspapers play the role of organisers.

The South Korean citizen journalist site, OhmyNews, is now asking citizens for their money, as well as their news contributions. The site is struggling to cope with the global economic slump and the attendant drop in advertising revenue, alongside the proliferation of rival news media platforms.

The project's founder, Oh Yeon-ho, published his plea yesterday in an open letter on the website: "For a news media to remain healthy, it will have to earn at least 50% of its income from the sales of content or paid subscriptions. Despite our best effort, OhmyNews still relies on advertisers for more than 70% of its revenue".

A common concern in the news media industry, particularly for smaller, alternative platforms, is to reduce dependence on the notoriously fickle world of advertising as a main revenue stream. Oh explained that if 100,000 readers joined the venture contributing KRW 10,000 a month, the site would no longer have to rely on advertising revenues.

OhmyNews was founded in 2000 based on the ethos that "every citizen is a reporter". Amateurs generate the majority of the content, although the site does have a 55 person-strong journalistic and editorial team. Its target audience was primarily the young, liberal and media savvy.