Following the pattern during previous disasters, citizen journalism is once again stepping up to fill in gaps which may have been left out by professional journalists. Launched in 2008, Pakistani software seenreport is currently serving as a platform through which individuals can post pictures and stories from floods in Pakistan.

Describing itself as a "people powered news site that enables common people to report pictures of events they witness," seenreport tries to combine related pictures to create relevant news. "Our vision is to be a platform where anyone can make news, be heard and bring change," the news website states. Long before the recent floods, seenreport came into prominence during the Long March in 2008, since even though there was heavy media censorship at the time, its platform provided for alternative means of reporting news; from mobile phones, for example.

Back in June Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of the New York Times, stated that social sharing via networking sites would not be affected by the implementation of a paywall. As the NYT is getting closer to putting up a metered pay wall (one that offers readers a certain number of articles free per month), it is simultaneously strengthening its social media currency. NYTimes.com is adding a "Login with Facebook" feature which requires users to sync the two websites, reports Paid Content.

The new feature will give NYT more control over how content is shared over Facebook. Users must "opt-in" to social sharing before any personal information is released to the NYT's website or to Facebook users within the user's network. Friends of the user will be able to view activities such as comments and recommendations on news content. Users who decline to opt-in will only receive the major stories of the day in their newsfeed. The NYT hopes the new feature will curb some of the privacy and clutter issues while increasing the opportunities for social engagement.

Danish paper Kristeligt Dagblad has started to include Wikipedia-inspired pages on topics that its readers often search for, to offer them a comprehensive guide to complex issues. "I believe that newspapers made a historic mistake in giving up the position as a provider of the big picture when news went online," said online editor, Anders Ellebæk Madsen. "Unfortunately, news sites are not where I go to if I need to understand the war in Afghanistan, for instance," he clarified "I go to Wikipedia."

Inspired by this belief, he and his team sought to be that source of information in the Christian national daily's areas of expertise: faith, ethics, morality and social issues. They wanted to organize their content, old and new, in a way that made sense and made it continually useful, rather than just offering a search box which leads to thousands of articles on each major theme. So they adopted a similar layout and structure to Wikipedia entries, although that is where the similarity ends: the pages cannot be updated wiki-style by users.

As the popularity of hyperlocal news soars, Alan Mutter has pointed out how this trend can affect paywalls. "The local news sites being developed by Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post and a growing number of other online players will dash the hopes of most newspaper publishers of charging for access to their online content," he declared on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Paywalls are becoming more common as publishers seek a business model for online news, but Internet users remain reluctant to pay for content which they previously got for free. "You can't blame publishers for wanting to recover the costs of creating content by charging for the online news that most of them have been giving away for free," Mutter wrote.

What exactly does it mean to be hyperlocal? Sarah Hartley lists 10 characteristics of this new trend.

The Washington Post recounts how a blog spread rumors that the Washington Times would close its doors. The story was viral for 48 hours before any real fact-checking was conducted.

Should news startups try to beat big media, or should they work together? Ana Acle-Menendez explains her hyperlocal website's symbiotic relationship with The Miami Herald.

Social networking websites are being used to share and promote long-form journalism. Bobble Johnson from The Guardian creates his own Twitter account @IfYouOnly, which attempts "to highlight and link [sic] a single piece of gripping, powerful and memorable writing each weekday."

The demand for the iPad has previously exceeded the supply, yet Apple is making efforts to decrease its shipping time from weeks to 24 hours.

The potential of crowdsourced information was made very clear during the first few hours following Haiti's earthquake. A brainchild of Ushahidi, SwiftRiver's role is to make the job of verifying crowdsourced information easier.

Speaking with Craig Silverman of Columbia Journalism Review, Jaroslav Valuch the project manager for Ushahidi Haiti, spoke about how challenging it was to verify crowdsourced data. Silverman writes that the "Ushahidi Haiti team had to sift through the river of reports, tweets and information and figure out which items deserved to be added to the map, and which should be discarded... by mapping the unverified reports, they were able to see if different sources were reporting similar things in similar areas. It was verification by aggregation." Even when a short code was created for the public to submit reports by cell phones, the verification process remained slow as it then consisted of calling back phone numbers that had sent in information.

Conventional knowledge dictates that younger generations dominate social media trends. However, older adults are now the largest growing demographic for use of social media. Pew Research found that between April 2009 to May 2010, the number of adults aged 50-64 who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin grew 88%, while usage among adults who are 64 and over went up by 100%. Editor&Publisher recently wrote an article stating newspapers' largest readership base is 55 years, and according to Pew Research this age group may be spending increasingly more time online.

While internet users ages 18-49 still dominate social platforms, when it concerns consuming news online the statistics appear relatively equal across generations. 44% of users ages 18-29 and 45% of users ages 30-49 read their news online. By comparison, users aged 50-64 who consume their news online is not too far behind the younger population at 42%, while the 64+ age category falls behind at 34%.Yet as social media use continues to grow among people 50 years and older, newspapers will be able fully employ Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms to increase the consumption of news among a wider spectrum of users.

Conflict between Climate Camp protesters and the press has arisen following apparent attempts by Climate Camp to restrict media access to their protests and the media's apparent lack of fact-checking.

The e-reader trend originally started with the Kindle, and it has continued to dominate the market. Since Apple released its potentially game-changing iPad, Amazon has been scrambling to keep up with its competitor. "The iPad has a touch screen, color, prettier software, audio and video playback, 100,000 apps," writes the New York Times. "For the Kindle, with its six-inch monochrome nontouch screen, the iPad was your basic (full-color) nightmare." With the price range comparable, the Kindle became the digital underdog overnight.

Technology is all about who can make the fastest, smallest, most bang-for-your-buck device in the market. That is exactly Kindle's strategy to survive in the marketplace. This week Amazon announced its newest version of the e-reader, the "Kindle 3." Amazon decreased the body size of the device by 21%, yet the six-inch screen remains the same size. The new Kindle weights only 8.5 ounces, which is a third the iPad's weight. Additionally Amazon lowered the price to from $400 to $140. For clients whose main objective is to use the device for reading, buying a Kindle seems an easier decision than purchasing a $500 iPad.

According to Nieman Journalism Lab, NPR will be launching its Argo Project on September 1. Local member stations are to collaborate to strengthen coverage on both a local and national scale and become hubs for different issues. Thus NPR's On campus: Everything higher education in Minnesota news source will blog in conjunction with NPR's The Key: Discovering Philly's best local music. A list of "network highlights" will be posted on each member's website, which will function to promote the smaller news units across NPR.

The interesting point about NPR's Argo project is the dynamics of the member stations' interaction. Nieman Journalism Lab comments "NPR is made up of its member stations, and there's long been tension between the growth of the national organization and the health of the individual stations who comprise its membership and rely on the network for much of their programming. For the mothership to be supporting local programming -- even if just on the web -- could smooth over what has at times been a contentious relationship."

Mail Online was the only British audited national newspaper website to report a monthly increase in unique browser traffic for July, according to the latest data released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe), Journalism.co.uk reported.

Mail Online had a slight increase of 0.38 percent from June to July at 2,494,916 daily unique browsers. Its year-on-year growth in daily visitor numbers also rose by 44 percent, Media Guardian reported.

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