Wikileaks has struck again, this time releasing a quarter of a million confidential US diplomatic cables to select news organisations. After several days of anticipation following the US state department's warning to Congress on 24 November, The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais published their first stories yesterday.

Wikileaks itself is publishing the cables in batches over the next few months. "The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice," said the organisation's dedicated site for this leak. It is the largest classified information release so far. The site allows users to browse the cables by date or by origin.

The newspapers were given access to the material "several weeks ago," according to the New York Times, and the five agreed to begin publication online on Sunday. All the publications involved gave the US government early warning of their intention to publish, according to the Guardian.

The ease and low cost of publishing content on the web has meant firstly that anyone can do it, and secondly that companies have taken advantage of this ease coupled with people's desire to publish their writing to generate income. These 'content farms' - such as Demand Media - churn out large amounts of content a day, which is highly optimized for search and therefore consistently appears high in search results, leading to criticism from newspaper publishers that they are threatening traditional journalism.

One company that offers a similar service to writers is Vancouver-based Suite101. But Suite101 is not a content farm, said its CEO Peter Berger. "We see ourselves as a service for writers and contributors," and "we see the writers as the core of our company, so we look at where they can create value."

Editor-in-chief of Suite101's French site, Jérémy Reboul, described said that if anything, the business as "a free range content farm." The main difference between Suite and content farms "is our relationship with writers," he added. "It's something I think our competitors don't have."

Nettby, the social network run by Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, is to close early next year. Launched in September 2006, it reached its peak in 2008, when it had 400,000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views, reported John Einar Sandvand, a Norwegian editor who blogs at Betatales.com. In a market of 4,5 million people, that is not insignificant. It was valued by its owners, the Schibsted Media Group, at around $31 million.

Originally, while Facebook, which also launched in Norway 2006, attracted many adult users in the country, Nettby was popular among teenagers. And by the end of 2008, said Nettby CEO Rune Røsten, three out of four teenagers had signed up to VG's service. However, Facebook took off among young people in early 2009 and Nettby has seen a steady decline since February of that year.

"The demise of this social community illustrates how hard it is for local players to compete with the global giants, like Facebook," said Sandvand. Today, 58% of Norwegians use Facebook on a regular basis, he said.

Werner Eggert, editor-in-chief and managing director of TV stations TIDE, has been appointed director of Bertelsmann's new International Academy of Journalism. The academy was founded in September to mark the media company's 175th anniversary, with the goal of working to spread and strengthen press freedom by training journalists in digital media and enabling networking.

The first round of fellows will be enrolled in the second half of 2011. Each year, the Academy will select journalists from all over the world who have championed freedom of speech and of the press in their native countries in a courageous and high-profile manner. They will be trained in the tools for digital journalism in both on-site workshops and via eLearning modules.

Eggert will take on the management of the Hamburg-based Academy on 1 January 2011. He has been involved in the project from its beginnings, and has ample experience as both a journalist and a lecturer, a Bertelsmann press release said, and has worked with journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Vietnam.

Wikileaks is poised to release new material - classified US State Department cables - with the help of the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Bloomberg reported.

Egyptian rights activists have created a website based on Ushahidi, U-shahid.com, to encourage members of the public to help monitor election rigging via mobile phone messaging, Twitter or Facebook. Volunteer staff will place the location and nature of the incidents on a map, according to the Associated Press.

The Committee to Protect Journalists handed out its annual press freedom awards on Tuesday.

The UK's ABCes for October have been released, and Mail Online has topped 50 million unique visitors, the Guardian reported, among traffic growth for all major UK newspaper sites.

Online tools and information available through social media are making the jobs of investigative journalists easier and more efficient, Mashable reports. According to the article, journalists are using "web socialization" to their advantage, not only by getting tips but also by using their online community relationships to get reader feedback, search documents and undercover potential wrongs.

Mashable lays out eight ways in which social media is "revolutionizing the traditional story format." Firstly, it's allowing journalists to "distribute" reporting tasks, trusting readers and community citizens to find and read-over documents involved in an investigation, then sharing newly-found information by way of commentary on the site.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen says, "This method works well because readers often know more than journalists about a given subject." He says, "With the help of readers and online tools, knowledge can start flowing in at a relatively low cost and with relatively few headaches. " Facebook is now the top-visited website in the United States with over 500 million users, so it offers a vast pool of people.

The Independent's new publication i, which re-edits and repurposes Independent content to create a more concise reading experience, is seeing sales continue to fall, the Guardian reported earlier this week. Roy Greenslade, who writes for both the Guardian and the Evening Standard (which is under the same ownership as the Independent), believes that the paper has not found its niche. "My fear is that the launch has failed," said Greenslade.

No official sales figures have as yet been released and will not be until next year, but the Guardian has been told by industry sources that sales of i are now averaging out at about 70,000 a day, compared to 180,000 at the time of the paper's launch in late October. The hope, Independent managing director Andrew Mullins told Press Gazette in October, was for 200,000 sales a day.

The Independent's new publication i is on special offer: one year's subscription for £35. This amounts to a saving of about £17 on the cover price.

Meanwhile, the Independent has looked at how was coverage might be distorted when journalists are embedded.

According to Gizmodo, the New York Times has published front-page photographs from Afghanistan taken on an iPhone using the Hipstamatic app.

French daily Les Echos has launched a blog of stories translated into English, in cooperation with new start up WorldCrunch.

Netbook specialist Acer is launching three potential iPad rivals, reports Fast Company.

Poynter's Damon Kiesow has decided that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was right to comment that the iPad was "not mobile." Using his recent interaction with the 60 Minutes iPad app as an example, Kiesow explained why the experience was leisurely, but definitely not mobile.

"If you were so inclined, it would be easy to spend an hour just browsing through old interviews with a current or former president," Kiesow said. The content you find on the iPad app would not work on a smart phone, he believes, but "is a much better fit" with the "more relaxed pace of a tablet session."

He believes that most other major media apps are not mobile either, and that they might not be trying to be. And indeed, the idea that news organisations are focusing on providing an immersive experience on the iPad would suggest that they are not focusing on the on-the-go reader.

Newspapers in Britain depend on advertising too much, which has been a large factor in closures and layoffs in recent years, according to a new book, commissioned by the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, MediaGuardian reported.

At the same time, the Internet may not be as responsible for lower profitability - online usage and profitability can and do work hand-in-hand in may places, the work claims.

For more on this story please see our sister publication www.sfnblog.com

A great debate over media concentration has been taking place in the UK as News Corp bids to buy BSkyB, whose properties include 24-hour news channel Sky News. News Corp already owns 39% of BSkyB, more commonly referred to as Sky, and there has been much opposition to allowing the purchase of the remainder of the company.

News Corp, via its subsidiary News International, owns The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World, which account for about 37% of the national newspaper market. Sky is the UK's largest pay TV platform, reaching one third of all homes. As well as news, it focuses on sports, films and entertainment. It also has a significant radio news presence. Combined, News Corp and BSkyB would have a turnover of £7.5bn, compared to the BBC's £4.8bn.