When considering the decline of the print press model, professionals need to decipher if the trend correlates equally to smaller papers. It is true that local papers may not have felt the shock of digital technology as much as national titles. Why is that? Rick Edmonds from Poynter explains that community papers have benefitted from an innate buffer between them and online news. Yet with the rapid growth of technology and hyperlocal news, journalists should not become compliant.

In the new era of journalism, users want to be in control of content. Thus when Digg redesigned their platform, they may have forgotten the key ingredient to news success: keeping the user as the main actor. According to ZDnet, Digg is scraping user-driven news in favor of having news promoted by publishers. "[Sic] if you have a user-driven site, it may be suicidal to try to take it in a direction that's opposed to the one your 'power users' want it to go," reports Jack Schofield for ZDnet. Yet other professionals in the media industry see suggesting interesting content to users as a powerful tool. Will Digg survive its redesign, or was its original model better suited for the current trends?

The Media Development Loan Fund has announced that its managing director Sasa Vucinic is to step down at the end of March 2011. Vucinic, who has run the MDLF for 25 years, will be succeeded by Harlan Mandel, deputy managing director for 13 years.

MDLF, based in New York, helps journalists build sustainable business around quality journalism via affordable capital and business advice and assistance. This summer the organization passed the US$ 100 million mark of loans, investments and assistance, and MDLF clients now provide news and information to more than 32 million people. The fund was founded by Vucinic and Washington Post journalist Stuart Auerbach in 1995.

Expressing satisfaction with the work MDLF has done so far, Vucinic explained his departure by saying that "I feel that this is the right time for me to move on and invent and build 'the next big thing'. MDLF, I am convinced, is more than ready and mature enough to be passed on to the next generation of leaders."

Chairman of MDLF's Board of Directors, Bernard Poulet, said that the board regrets but understands Vucinic's decision, and uninamously approves the appointment of Mandel, who has "demonstrated all the talents needed for the job."

Source: MDLF press release

According to atinternet-institute.com, "social networks are at the heart of breaking news," but a recent study showed that news is looked at more when on Facebook. The study found that Facebook accounts holders French news Web sites one time out of one hundred, which is 13 times more than with Twitter. The twelve leading French news Web sites were looked at for this study.

Plus, "for overall traffic, after all different traffic sources have been considered for French news Web sites, the average share of Facebook as a referrer was 1.3 percent from the 6th to the 12th September 2010 and only 0.1 percent for Twitter," according to the study.

Also, when taking the same amount of Web sites into consideration, Google's share was 40.6 in France, or 30 times more than Facebook. Even though this is high, people should remember that the main function of search engines like Google are to suggest user links, while Facebook does not do so. Facebook had more 1.3 percent more traffic than Bing, Microsoft's search engine, however.

"Considering the high number of different traffic sources available on the Internet, Facebook is well-placed and is experiencing an upward trend," said to the article. Furthermore, "the average share of Facebook as a referrer doubled since March 2010."

The Associated Press has launched two new mobile "super apps" for Blackberry smart phones, AP Móvil América Latina, "bringing users global news in multiple languages around the world," and a new version of AP Mobile, world edition, according to a press release. Both of these apps are free on Blackberry App World.

According to the press release, the launch of these apps shows that the AP is the premiere source of news all over the world, "while helping support the continued international growth of the Blackberry platform."

The AP Mobile world edition app will let users set a location to receive news and weather in whatever region they reside in--such as Europe, Africa, Asia or the Middle East. AP Móvil América Latina brings the news to 20 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. "Upon choosing their region, users receive news, weather and other information in Spanish or Portuguese specific to their chosen location," adds the AP.

Both apps are so-called "Super Apps" that bring together contextualization, efficiency, and tight integration with other Blackberry apps to offers users the best "possible user experience."

With the plethora of online comments, newspapers are having difficultly editing responses from their users. Reuters recently noted this problem, claiming the importance of encouraging comments that advance the content of the story while simultaneously blocking tasteless responses. "I've become increasingly concerned about the quality of discourse in comments on news stories on Reuters.com and on other major news sites," reports Dean Wright. "On some stories, the 'conversation' has been little more than partisans slinging invective at each other under the cloak of anonymity," Wright refers to how Richard Baum, Reuters Global Editor for Consumer Media, is handling the comment dilemma.

Baum affirms that newspapers need to have control over what users publish onto professional news sites. He explains that comments which contain racist language, incitement to violence, uncivil behavior towards other users are plainly unacceptable. Other types of comments where there is excessive use of capital letters, spelling and grammar errors, or irrelevant responses to the story reflect poorly on the newspaper industry. "When we block comments of this nature, it's because of issues of repetition, taste or legal risk, not political bias," says Baum.

According to The Washington Post, Bloomberg, the "New York giant of financial news and data," is going to hire over 100 people in Washington and has "leased new space as it prepares to launch its Web-based government information venture, Bloomberg Government."

According to brandrepublic.com, The European Media and Marketing Survey, which is published by the Amsterdam-based Synovate Research Group, found that the "the core Eurosport channel is identified as reaching 8 percent of the wealthiest 20 percent households in Europe, ahead of the next highest reaching TV stations MTV and Franco-German culture channel Arte which each reach 7.4 percent of high earners."

Mayhill Fowler tells of why she left as an unpaid writer for the Huffington Post on mayhillfowler.com.

The Washington Post and msnbc.com are going to pick up an investigation on American transportation safety, which was conducted by journalism students from eleven universities "participating in the Carnegie-Knight Journalism Initiative in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity," according to Editor and Publisher.

The multimedia package consists of 23 stories and a dozen photos, videos and interactive graphics and was created by News21, "a journalism initiative funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami to promote in-depth and innovative journalism," states the article on the program.

The investigation found that the National Transportation Safety Board (the federal panel that investigates accidents and brings forth different ways to prevent them), has "given up on 1,952 of its safety recommendations," states the article.

The Pittsburg Post Gazette's PG+ online subscription service has shown the paper that profitability online is possible but modestly so, and that more than one business model is necessary, according to Poynter's Bill Mitchell. Mitchell spoke to Post-Gazette president Chris Chamberlain who explained that revenue started to exceed expenses in April but he wouldn't say exactly how much money is coming in.

PG+ was launched in September 2009 as a kind of membership club, offering access not only to additional specially created content which was intended to be more interactive and social, but also to a serious of perks. Mary Leonard, the Post-Gazette's deputy editor, said in an interview last year that most of these benefits and discounts are arranged by the paper's marketing department, but some involve meeting with editorial staff.

Leonard said last year that many of those who had signed up were sports fans, and sports content has been even more popular than expected, Mitchell said, and during major events such as the NFL draft, it accounts for as much as 90 to 95% of PG+ traffic.

Assistant general counsel for The Associated Press Karen Kaiser, who leads the Freedom of Information Act legal work for AP, recently offered tips for news organizations and citizens in pressing FOIA requests. She was speaking at the Iowa Freedom of Information Council's annual meeting last week in Des Moines.

The fact that newsrooms are shrinking raises the possibility that news organisations might no longer have the staff or money to continue fighting to force government agencies to abide by the law, she said. However, she stressed that technology-driven change is not only threatening business models: "it has also brought us better tools to perform our watchdog role."

For a start, more information is available to journalists online due to regulations that outline what government agencies need to make available on the Internet. And computer assisted reporting, or CAR, and other technologies allow journalists to analyse and review enormous quantities of data far faster and more efficiently than they did before. She offered an example of an AP story on the US Cash for Clunkers programme, which she said would never have happened without FOIA and without journalists skilled in CAR.

Apple and Android are at it again, but who will come out on top of the Android vs. Apple battle? According to the USA News Week Blog, Samsung has recently unveiled a tablet device, which will come out soon -- the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab. "The Tab is a 7-inch slate and it is expected that it would compete with Apple's hugely successful tablet device--the iPad," according to the article. There are other Android tablets, like the Dell Streak, but the Tab is reportedly going to be seen as the "first true competitor" to the iPad.

The Samsung Galaxy Tablet is both smaller and lighter than the iPad, which has a 9.7- inch screen. However, "rumors are rife that Samsung will release larger editions before the end of the year. The Tab has the same speed processor as the iPad but its RAM is twice as strong as iPad," according to the article. The Tab also comes with different options for storage like the iPad and will be able to "support up to 32GB of expandable storage; while the iPad is limited to internal space only," the article also states.