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.

The hyperlocal trend keeps on growing as more and more companies start hyperlocal efforts. The latest one to launch is TapIn, an iPod and iPhone app by the people behind Tackable, an app designed to make newsgathering easy. TapIn, however, is something more ambitious, as it combines several elements that are found in other location-based apps in order to disseminate and gather news.

"We think that it's going to serve as an interesting prototype for the newspaper of the future," Tackable's chief marketing officer Luke Stangel said to Poynter. At the heart of TapIn is the idea of location-based news filtering. It may not be the ideal solution for all situations, as Poynter noted, but can work very well for news outlets that concentrate on community news.

For now, TapIn uses content from the MediaNews Group's newspapers in the San Francisco Bay region, but it already has plans to expand to Los Angeles and Denver markets, where MediaNews has more newspapers.

The relationship between Apple and the publishing industry hasn't been the smoothest one, but the tech giant has taken steps towards publishers lately. For one, it is giving a more prominent place for newspapers and magazines in the upcoming iOS operating system, which was announced on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. IOS5 will include a feature called Newsstand, which will improve newspaper apps' exposure and present the user's newspaper app subscriptions in one location.

Yesterday, the press caught on the fact that Apple had quietly made changes to its much criticised in-app subscription guidelines. The most significant change related to app pricing. Mac Rumors was one of the first sites to report that Apple has now removed any specifications regarding pricing from the terms, allowing publishers to now set their prices freely. Previously, Apple had required that app subscriptions sold in the App Store had to be the "same price or less" with subscriptions the publisher offered outside the app.

Journalists are expanding their boundaries and changing with the times. A new digital world means that they have to not only research and write their story, but also provide pictures and videos. To help them to this end, BBC is giving its reporters smartphones, reported Press Gazette.

After taking a social media course, journalist Chrissy Sturt wrote a letter asking why the BBC didn't supply its journalists with iPhones. "The iPhone is one of the best ways to keep across social media, and when you're out on a fast-moving story they are invaluable," she wrote.

Sturt felt that she and her fellow journalists were being held back by not being supplied with smartphones. "We need these phones, and it's not fair that some people are using their own iPhones to do the BBC's newsgathering."

BBC's head of newsgathering Fran Unsworth took the message to heart. She responded, "We recognise that it is essential for journalists in the field to be connected to the flow of information about the story they are covering. Smartphones, including iPhones, are being rolled out to enable staff to send live and recorded audio, video and stills. A range of models is being used and equipment is being issued as older items come up for replacement."