“Get the wider story”, says the new photography iPad app that Reuters launched last week.

Aiming to re-imagine the way news photography can engage its audience on a multimedia platform, The Wider Image app offers the public a selection of the best photos gathered by the news agency's vast network of photographers around the world.

The Wider Image takes advantage of new storytelling possibilities on the iPad.

Stories are a swirl of photos, narrative slideshows, interactive sequences, testmonies by photographers, expanded fact boxes and data charts and locations viewed on a world map. The Wider Image has been launched with over 100 stories and 50 in-depth photographer profiles, with more to be added regularly.

Felix Salmon of Reuters put forth a controversial business proposition involving The New York Times in an article yesterday: why not charge hedge funds a fee in order to receive breaking news of investigative stories a full trading day before publication?

Salmon came to this conclusion when the value of Wal-Mart’s shares plunged after the Times published an exposé over the weekend about alleged bribery of Mexican officials by the company, he said in the article.

Noting how much the piece affected the stock market, Salmon suggested that the Times could take advantage of this influence by allowing corporate clients early access to such investigative material for a price, which could supplement the paper’s losses in revenue.

“But how much would hedge funds pay to be able to see the NYT’s big investigative stories during the trading day prior to the appearance of the story?” Salmon wrote. “It’s entirely normal, and perfectly ethical, for news organizations, including Reuters, to give faster access to the best-paying customers.”

Facebook's $5 billion IPO filing this week has left the world in little doubt about the growing importance of social media in our lives. Now, both adapting to this trend and looking at its power, Reuters has launched a social media hub with a special focus on the interaction between social media and business.

Social Pulse, as the new hub is called, contains a curated selection of news from across Reuters' social media networks. The top section, titled The Hit List, features the most popular stories shared by people followed by Reuters accounts and Reuters journalists on Twitter. In a blogpost about Social Pulse, Reuters stresses that it follows influential "newsmakers", to bring its readers stories popular with the people who are setting the news agenda. The section is managed through the curation company Percolate, also used by IPG and American Express.

For the rest of this article please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

Reuters is stepping up its social media efforts: the news agency named Anthony De Rosa as its new social media editor yesterday. De Rosa is currently a product manager and technologist at Reuters. Poynter published the memo announcing De Rosa's appointment.

As a social media editor, De Rosa's role will consist of integrating social networks, where news often breaks first, into Reuters platforms. He will assist Reuters journalists and editors "use social media tools to monitor news, report news, and find leads," according to the memo. De Rosa has obvious credentials to take up such a role: the New York Times called him "the undisputed King of Tumblr", referring to his top-ranking Tumblr blog, and according to NBC New York he is one of the top 20 people to follow on Twitter.

De Rosa's appointment is in line with latest developments at news organisations, as more and more of them are seeing social media as offering valuable tools for journalists, in addition to having huge potential as a traffic driver. Moreover, latest reports show that social networks are having an ever more integral role in their users' lives, which would make an expansion to the social media field a tempting option for any news outlet.