The creator of both the website and magazine is Jesus Maraña, former director of Público, an online newspaper in Spain. After the dissolution of Público last year, Maraña met with Mediapart to launch infoLibre. Relying on reader subscriptions rather than ads, the online newspaper is dedicated to reporting the news without political or financial backers. Listed on their website are eight journalistic principles that infoLibre promises to maintain. The majority of infoLibre’s staff comes from other major Spanish newspapers.

In an interview with Mediapart, Maraña said journalism in Spain suffers from a “weakness” which affects how readers get their news. With Spain facing an increasing economic crisis, Maraña partnered with other journalists to create a one-stop source for news.

infoLibre is divided into five categories; politics, economy, culture, society, and the media. The site also has a “true or false” tab where they take articles and rate them based on their validity. The print version, Tinta Libre, allows non-members of infoLibre to access exclusive content different from that of the website.

In an interview with El Mundo, Maraña expressed hope that the quality content of infoLibre will result in potential subscribers. The site will also publish its annual accounts.

Did you know that only 29 percent of Lady Gaga’s 30 million followers on Twitter actually exist? Let me just repeat that: 29 percent. That’s less than a third. The overwhelming majority are unreal, inert, mere cyphers shackled together in a collective expression of inanimate inanity. Isn’t that extraordinary?

Well, no, actually. Earlier this year, StatusPeople introduced a web tool called the Fake Follower Check that claims to ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have. Lady Gaga, it turns out, is far from unusual: a writer at Forbes used the application to determine that 70 percent of Justin Bieber's 27 million followers are fake, as are 88 percent of Britney Spears', and 74 percent of Oprah Winfrey's.

Now, clearly, there are many plausible explanations why an account might be ‘fake’. Vast quantities of automated spam permeate the site’s chasmic recesses, and many once-genuine profiles are simply inactive. Recently, however, a more insidious manifestation of this fakery has come to light: namely, the phenomenon of ‘followers for sale’.

What have been the biggest changes in the media over the last ten years? Will the Internet be held responsible for killing the newspaper? Did a new fragmented audience determine the end of the mass audience?

These are just a few of the questions a new report published on October 11 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford tried to answer, analyzing  “Ten years that shook the media world”. It covers eight countries across the world from mature media markets - the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, France, Italy and Germany - and emerging economies Brazil and India.

Clearly, the news industry has undergone a vast amount of change over the last decade. Some trends are long-lived, such as the ongoing fragmentation of most television audience, the decline of paid print newspaper circulation or the rise of Internet access and use. Others are more recent, such as the emergence of a few dominant search engines, the relentless expansion of social media sites and the spread of mobile web access. All these trends have been observed on a global scale; nevertheless they developed differently in different countries accordingly to the peculiarity of each media system. 

5. Memory lane, by ABC News via the Huffington Post

Let’s start from the beginning: Nixon slammed his knee on a car door for the second time, and an aid applied a coat of “lazy shave” to hide his six o’clock shadow. Meanwhile, JFK was changing from a white shirt into a light blue one to avoid glare in his televised image.

September 26, 1960 marked a milestone in political journalism: it was the first time that a pair of U.S. presidential hopefuls had ever faced off before their country for a live, televised debate.

The candidates were John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Millhous Nixon. For American voters, it was an unprecedented opportunity to watch their two presidential candidates duke it out, from the comfort of their homes.

Ten sets of televised debates later, not only do many American voters still tune in from their living rooms, but tens of millions of people around the world stream the action- and participate in the commentary it engenders- from a plethora of devices.