Readers familiar with the British daily The Independent will notice something lacking from its pages after its most recent re-launch. According to Press Gazette's The Wire, The Independent no longer has its Monday Media Section. Instead, The Independent's media coverage is now scattered throughout the publication's new "viewspaper" section.

Eliminating the media section may come as a surprise to some. The recent buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad as well as the past year's media crisis would suggest that a media section is both important and relevant as media and technology become increasingly intertwined. However, The Guardian with their Media Guardian section now stands the only publication that devotes an entire section to developments in the media.

The Independent's re-launch has received mixed but mostly positive reviews. The most notable change to the paper is the inclusion of a 20 page "viewspaper" which is a new section that replaces traditional news with analysis and commentary. Peter preston from The Guardian's media blog described the paper as "stylish, cool and coherent," while others remain unconvinced or unhappy with the new changes.

Bloomberg is the latest news organization to attempt to take a bite out of the WSJ readership with a redesigned website. Bloomberg.com has ditched its old black and amber for a more traditional black text on a white screen look, reports Business Insider.

With its makeover, Bloomberg aims to position itself as the only financial news destination online. Its website's new layout combines Bloomberg's financial data, breaking news, commentary, with aggregated economic news stories from other sources. Media Bistro observes that the new layout and the colors make Bloomberg look more geared to average, everyday readers than financiers. Maybe Media Bistro is referring to the new layout's reliance of a vast array of images, rather than simply text and graphs, on its front page.
The financial data and news company, which already is a profitable operation, aims to give its main competitors, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, some stiff competition with a redesigned website.

Kevin Krim, head of Bloomberg.com, told Business Insider that its website needed "a new platform, a new palette, a new canvasto deliver a must-use site for news throughout the day, every week" in order to grow its global audience.

The New York Times has just given its Business Section online a facelift to make it look just like its own home page, a move that will allow it to compete with the Wall Street Journal's main offering, Ad Age reports.

The new homepage for the Business section highlights the importance of this sections with top-left and top-right "rabbit ears" and units that had been only for the paper's standard home page. It also includes a tab with automated latest news from the NYT and other news websites. Its remodeled business section is currently promoting itself on Bloomberg, USA Today, Yahoo, and MSN.
While the newspaper's total staff has been reduced, the Business section has been hiring a number of reporters and editors bringing its business coverage to 85 from 78. The NYT is also benefiting from content published by Dow Jones journalists.

Even though economic news have definitely gained importance with the economic crisis, and the allure of the affluent crowd business newspapers attract have been strong incentives, other motives are behind the initiative.

If visiting Guardian is part of your daily routine, you may have noticed a couple of changes on their website's front page. The Guardian just launched a redesigned front page today.

Although the changes made to the front page of the second most-visited newspaper website in the UK are extremely subtle, Janine Gibson, editor of Guardian.co.uk, wrote a blog post to explain why some minor tweaks were needed.

Here are some of the highlights from Gibson's post.

First, Gibson says that the Guardian.co.uk needed to be redesigned so it would adapt to the new uses journalists are giving it. Today, the newspaper is producing a lot more video and multimedia than it used to, and they want to make greater use of photographs. The old page layout restricted the use of video. The redesign definitely highlights the importance of multimedia content in Guardian's online edition.

Second, the new trending area of the front page contains links to the key subjects of the day and points readers to the best resources for each topic.

Third, the blogs are being integrated as regular content, so the "Our blogs: Join the conversation" section has been removed. They are now just featured as regular content, one in one with articles.