Leading Italian daily La Repubblica has joined forces with the financial information giant Bloomberg to create a finance and business section hosted on Repubblica's website.

Repubblica has been the most-visited general news site in Italy for the past 14 years and this partnership with finance behemoth Bloomsberg is intended to give the publication the edge in the digital financial information game. La Repubblica is the first daily newspaper outside of the United States to have struck up a partnership with Bloomberg, and is only the second daily in the world to do so, after The Washington Post.

The move is intended put more information on the hands of Repubblica's journalists. The official press release announcing the deal stated "The site will be run by Repubblica editorial staff, making use of the wealth of information offered by Bloomberg (financial data, international economic news, and audiovisuals) and the contribution of Repubblica journalists, columnists and foreign correspondents".

Sources: Repubblica, Repubblica and Bloomberg press release

In a university journalism class, Davin Harner asked his students where they had first heard the news about Bin Laden's death. Although these students studied journalism, not a single one named a newspaper. Most, in fact, named Facebook. The one student that cited CNN corrected himself saying, "I heard about it on Facebook, and then I turned on CNN to find out more."

Although Harner's anecdote demonstrates the importance of Facebook, Twitter, and other digital communication for sharing news, it should come as no surprise to a user of a social media platform. Facebook and Twitter instantly become abuzz with updates when news breaks or an anticipated sports game ends. Sharing on social media has become almost an instinct to its users. It creates a conversation beyond than the bounds of journalism itself.
As these platforms evolve, so has our understanding of how sharing media works. MySpace, the original social media giant, was more of an online profile than anything else. Although Myspace friends could share links with each other, the relationship was one to one. A link would have to be posted on one person's profile, and only those looking at that profile would be able to see it.

Partnerships between news organizations and non profit organizations are becoming increasingly more common, especially in a local context.

Nieman Lab has reported on another example of these marriages in Virginia, between the newspaper The Daily Progress and Charlottesville Tomorrow, a non-profit focused on land use and development issues.

Charlottesville Tomorrow was launched in 2005, privately-funded by donations and grants, covering no general local news but just in-depth growth and development stories.
In 2008 it started to work with with the local daily newspaper to publish its content in The Daily Progress' print and online editions.

The partnership involves no exchange of money, and the newspaper retains control over story editing and presentation.

The editorial workflow between Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Daily Progress is informal, as the managing editors trade emails at the beginning of every week to arrange story coverage.

Third-party journalistic content producers: newspapers' partnerships, outsourcing of news production, the use of newswire news, news aggregators... Is it getting too complicated?

Readers want newspapers to be an authoritative source of news, as well as providers of original content. The Internet allows everyone to find news everywhere, from any sources available. Newspapers' strong point is their ability to provide more in-depth coverage and to put a sort of a "quality label" on content, as a result of the history and the trustworthiness behind the newspaper's brand.

However, newspapers do not always have the time and the resources to go in deep in every story that could be worthwhile. Beside the bylines of newspapers' staffers appear then bylines and tags that readers might not always be able to recognise and value.
Writing about content provider partnerships that are unfamiliar to readers, Arthur S. Brisbane, The New York Times' public editor, said: "The Times's inclusion of the new providers, though, makes sense journalistically and economically. Attracting an audience, in print and in the expanding digital universe, requires ever more content and at a manageable cost. But managing this expansion carries risks".